He was certain, for his part, that the time was at midnight on the eleventh of August.

His followers became very zealous, and such is the nature of an infection that scarcely anybody was able to resist it.

Mrs.Anderson, true to her excitable temper, became fanatic--dreaming dreams, seeing visions, hearing voices, praying twenty times a day[2], wearing a sourly pious face, and making all around her more unhappy than ever.

Jonas declared that ef the noo airth and the noo heaven was to be chockful of sech as she, 'most any other place in the univarse would be better, akordin' to his way of thinkin'.

He said she repented more of other folkses' sins than anybody he ever seed.
[Footnote 2: Mrs.Anderson was less devout than some of her co-religionists; the wife of a well-known steamboat-clerk was accustomed to pray in private fifty times a day, hoping by means of this praying without ceasing to be found ready when the trumpet should sound.] As summer came on, Samuel Anderson, borne away on the tide of his own and his wife's fanatical fever of sublimated devotion, discharged Jonas and all his other _employes_, threw up business, and gave his whole attention to the straightening of his accounts for the coming day of judgment.