nt of a religious sort. Except in
the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were
scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from
a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the
settlers. In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had
been persecuted for their faith: Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of
diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of
fiery zeal, their cravings for "the light that never was on sea or
land," but not that education by contact with law and order which, in
older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.

With the religious revivals came signs and wonders. A wave of peculiar
psychical phenomena swept over the country, in explanation of which the
belief most widely received was that of the direct interposition of God
or the devil. The difficulty of discerning between the working of the
good and the bad spirit in abnormal manifestations was to most minds
obviated by the fact that they looked out upon the confusing scene
through the glasses of rigidly defined opinion, and according as the
affected person did or did not conform to the spectator's view of truth,
so he was judged to be a saint or a demoniac. Few sought to learn rather
than to judge; one of these very few was a young man by name Ephraim
Croom. He was by nature a student, and, being of a feeble constitution,
he enjoyed what, in that country and time, was the very rare privilege
of indulging his literary tastes under the shelter of the parental roof.

In one of the last years of the eighteenth century Croom the elder had
come with a young wife from his father's home in Massachusetts to settle
in a township called New Manchester, in the State of New York. He was a
Baptist by creed; a man of strong will, strong affections, and strong
self-respect. Taking the portion of goods which was his by right, he
sallied forth into the new country, thrift and intelligence written upon
his forehead, thinking there the more largely to establish the
prosperity of the green bay tree, and to serve his God and generation
the better by planting his race in the newer land.

The thirtieth year after his emigration found him a notable person in
the place that he had chosen, with almost the same physical strength as
in youth, stern, upright, thrifty, the owner of large mills, of a
substantial wooden residence, and of many acres of land. He was as rich