nd on them than wriggle in mere
chaotic space. Good morning, Doctor. I shall come again soon; I shall
keep a lookout on you."

"Good morning," he replied, kindly. "I hope to see you in a better frame
before many days."

I hurried back to my hotel, and questioned the landlord about this
revival of the age of miracles. He gave me a long account of the affair,
and then every neighbor who strolled in gave me another, until by
dinner-time I had heard wonders and absurdities enough to make a new
"Book of Mormon." The lunacies of this Riley had entered into Dr. Potter
and his parishioners, like the legion of devils into the herd of swine,
and driven them headlong into a sea of folly. There had been more
tongues spoken during the past month in this little Yankee city than
would have sufficed for our whole stellar system. Blockheads who were
not troubled with an idea once a fortnight, and who could neither write
nor speak their mother English decently, had undertaken to expound
things which never happened in dialects which nobody understood. People
who hitherto had been chiefly remarkable for their ignorance of the
past and the slowness of their comprehension of the present fell to
foretelling the future, with a glibness which made Isaiah and Ezekiel
appear like minor prophets, and a destructiveness which nothing would
satisfy out the immediate advent of the final conflagration. Gouty
brothers whose own toes were a burden to them, and dropsical sisters
with swelled legs, hobbled from street to street, laying would-be
miraculous hands on each other, on teething children, on the dumb and
blind, on foundered horses and mangy dogs even, or whatsoever other
sickly creature happened to get under their silly noses. The doctors
lost half their practice in consequence of the reliance of the people on
these spiritual methods of physicking. Children were taken out of school
in order that they might attend the prophesyings and get all knowledge
by supernatural intuition. Logic and other worldly methods of arriving
at truth were superseded by dreams, discernings of spirits, and similar
irrational processes. The public madness was immense, tempestuous, and
unequalled by anything of the kind since the "jerks" which appeared in
the early part of this century under the thundering ministrations of
Peter Cartwright. That nothing might be lacking to make the movement a
fact in history, it had acquired a name. As its disciples used the word
"dispe