“I should be a very poor judge of it, if he always speaks in his unknown tongues.”

“English!  English! he talks English as good as your own.  A more gentlemanly person, a more intelligent mind, a meeker and more believing spirit, I have not met this many a day.  He is still here, and he is my right hand in the work.  I shall soon have the pleasure of making you acquainted with him.”

“Thank you; I shall be delighted,” said I.  “Only be good enough to hint to him that I like to understand what is said to me.  If he comes at me with unknown tongues, I shall wish him in unknown parts.  I can’t stand mysteries.  I am a geologist, and believe that there are rocks all the way down, and that we had much better stand 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 “dispensation” freely, the public called them Dispensationists, and their faith Dispensationism, while their meetings received the whimsical title of Dispensaries.