ohn the
Baptist, devoted himself as a kind of servant to his new Messiah; and
the deluded men began to supply all the temporal wants of the impostor,
believing their estates set apart as the beginning of the material
Kingdom of God!

After three months, some of Mills' friends, on charges of lunacy, caused
Mills to be sent to Bloomingdale Asylum, and Matthias to be thrust into
the insane poor's ward at Bellevue, where his beard was forcibly cut
off, to his extreme disgust. His brother, however, got him out by a
habeas corpus, and he went to live with Folger. Mills now disappears
from the story.

Matthias remained in the full enjoyment of his luxurious establishment,
until September, 1834, it is true, with a few uncomfortable
interruptions. He was always both insolent and cowardly, and thus often
irritated some strong-minded auditor, and got himself into some pickle
where he had to sneak out, which he did with much ease. In his seedy
days the landlord of a hotel in whose bar-room he used to preach and
curse, put him down when he grew too abusive, by coolly and sternly
telling him to go to bed. Mr. Folger himself had one or two brief
intervals of sense, in one of which, angered at some insolence of
Matthias, he seized him by the throat, shook him well, and flung him
down upon a sofa. The humbug knowing that his living was in danger, took
this very mildly, and readily accepted the renewed assurances of belief
which poor Folger soon gave him. In the village of Sing Sing where
Folger had a country-seat which he called Mount Zion, Matthias was
exceedingly obnoxious. His daughter had married a Mr. Laisdell; and the
humbug, who claimed that all Christian marriages were void and wicked,
by some means induced the young wife to come to Sing Sing, where he
whipped her more than once quite cruelly. Her husband came and took her
away after encountering all the difficulty which Matthias dared make;
and, at a hearing in the matter before a magistrate, he was very near
getting tarred and feathered, if not something worse, and the danger
frightened him very much.

He barely escaped being shaved by violence, and being thrown overboard
to test his asserted miraculous powers, at the hands of a stout and
incredulous farmer on the steamboat between Sing Sing and New York.
While imprisoned at Bellevue before his trial, he was tossed in a
blanket by the prisoners, to make him give them some money. The unlucky
prophet dealt out damnation to t