Gin him any sum you please, and it all comes out 1843!" Now in all the region round about Sugar Grove school-house there was a great dearth of sensation.

The people liked the prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives.

Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world, as described by Elder Hankins, unless it had been a first-class circus (with two camels and a cage of monkeys attached, so that scrupulous people might attend from a laudable desire to see the menagerie!) A murder would have been delightful to the people of Clark township.

It would have given them something to think and talk about.
Into this still pool Elder Hankins threw the vials, the trumpets, the thunders, the beast with ten horns, the he-goat, and all the other apocalyptic symbols understood in an absurdly literal way.

The world was to come to an end in the following August.