as it would
not do for a stranger to come into the town and hang out a sign,
stating that he was a spirit raiser, it was necessary for Rogers to
pretend that he had come on other business, and so he took charge of a
small school outside of the town, but gave the greater part of his time
to investigating the minds of the people of Morristown, in order that he
might find out what he could do in the way of duping them; and in the
words of the old writer, he found that this would be a good place for
the "marvelous exhibitions which he was able to facilitate with the
greatest alacrity."

Of course, he was not at all willing to begin business with the support
of only two persons, and the first thing he did was to gather together
as many men as possible who really wished to be rich, and who were
willing to be governed by him in regard to the way in which they should
go about obtaining the vast hoard buried far away in the mountain. After
a time he succeeded in getting together as many as forty men, who all
thoroughly believed in his honesty and in his ability to take them out
to Schooley's Mountain, to call up the spirits who guarded the treasure,
to induce them to turn it over to them, and then to vanish peaceably,
without offering to molest or harm any one.

But it was a long time before Rogers was ready to lead his company on
the great quest. There were many, many things that had to be done before
they could start, and he soon found that he was not able to work out his
great scheme alone; so he went back to Connecticut and got another
schoolmaster, to whom he divulged his secret, and brought him to
Morristown, and the two together went into the spirit business with
great energy and enterprise. Night after night the company of treasure
seekers met together, sometimes in a dark room, and sometimes out in the
wild, lonely fields, close to black forests, and out of sight and
hearing of human abodes.

Rogers was a chemist; and he frequently went out to one of these lonely
meeting places in the afternoon and prepared a mine, which he exploded
during the midnight meetings, and thus created a great wonder and terror
among his followers. When they were indoors, there would be knockings
and strange voices heard coming through the cracks; these voices
proceeding from the other schoolmaster, who covered his mouth with what
the writer of the pamphlet calls "a superficial machine," probably a bit
of tin with a hole in it, which so dis