u go up to the chamber closet and get the silver and bring it
down. This man is going to sleep there and I am afraid of him. He must
be a fortune-teller, and the Lord only knows what else!"

In going to the chamber the daughter had to pass through the bar-room.
As she was moving quietly through, hoping to escape the notice of the
newcomer, he turned in his chair, and looking her full in the face,
suddenly said:--

"Madam, you needn't touch your silver. I don't want it. I am a
gentleman."

Whereupon the bewildered Betsy scuttled back to her mother and told her
the strange guest was indeed a fortune-teller.

Of Cochrane's initial appearance as a preacher Ivory had told Waitstill
in their talk in the churchyard early in the summer. It was at a child's
funeral that the new prophet created his first sensation and there,
too, that Aaron and Lois Boynton first came under his spell. The whole
countryside had been just then wrought up to a state of religious
excitement by revival meetings and Cochrane gained the benefit of this
definite preparation for his work. He claimed that all his sayings
were from divine inspiration and that those who embraced his doctrine
received direct communication from the Almighty. He disdained formal
creeds and all manner of church organizations, declaring sectarian names
to be marks of the beast and all church members to be in Babylon. He
introduced re-baptism as a symbolic cleansing from sectarian stains, and
after some months advanced a proposition that his flock hold all things
in common. He put a sudden end to the solemn "deaconing-out" and droning
of psalm tunes and grafted on to his form of worship lively singing
and marching accompanied by clapping of hands and whirling in circles;
during the progress of which the most hysterical converts, or the most
fully "Cochranized," would swoon upon the floor; or, in obeying their
leader's instructions to "become as little children," would sometimes go
through the most extraordinary and unmeaning antics.

It was not until he had converted hundreds to the new faith that he
added more startling revelations to his gospel. He was in turn bold,
mystical, eloquent, audacious, persuasive, autocratic; and even when his
self-styled communications from the "Almighty" controverted all that his
hearers had formerly held to be right, he still magnetized or hypnotized
them into an unwilling assent to his beliefs. There was finally a
proclamation to the effect t