het, and
leave him to pursue the straight line of his mission. The ministers
warned the people on the following Sunday against false prophets, but
did not say that man was a false prophet, while with their own
denunciations they went on all the same. The chief effects of it all
were excitement and fear. There was little sign of repentance. But the
spiritual physicians did not therefore doubt their exhibition. They
only increased the dose. The prophet appeared one day. He had vanished
the next.

But within a few days, a still more awful prediction rose, cloud-like,
on the spiritual sky. A placard was found affixed to the doors of every
place of worship in the town, setting forth in large letters that,
according to certain irrefragable calculations from "the number of a
man" and other such of the more definite utterances of Daniel and St
John, the day of judgment must without fail fall upon the next Sunday
week. Whence this announcement came no one knew. But the truth is,
every one was willing it should remain shrouded in the mystery
congenial to such things. On the door of the parish-church, it found an
especially suitable place; for that, not having been painted for many
years, still retained the mourning into which it had been put on
occasion of the death of the great man of the neighbourhood, the owner
of all Glamerton, and miles around it--this mourning consisting of a
ground of dingy black, over which at small regular distances had been
painted a multitude of white spots with tails, rather more like commas
than tadpoles, intended to represent the falling tears of lamenting
tenants and humble servants generally. Curly's grandfather had been the
artist of the occasion. In the middle of this door stood the awful
prophecy, surrounded on every side by the fall of the faded tears; and
for anything anybody knew, it might have been a supernatural exudation
from the damp old church, full of decay for many a dreary winter.
Dreadful places, those churches, hollow and echoing all the week! I
wonder if the souls of idle parsons are condemned to haunt them, and
that is what gives them that musty odour and that exhausting air.

Glamerton was variously affected by this condensation of the vapour of
prophecy into a definite prediction.

"What think ye o' 't, Thomas Crann?" said Andrew Constable. "The
calcleation seems to be a' correck. Yet somehoo I canna believe in't."

"Dinna fash yer heid aboot it, Anerew. There's a heep o' j