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THE religious excitement reached its culmination
as the tenth and eleventh of August came on.
Some made ascension-robes. Work was suspended
everywhere. The more abandoned, unwilling to
yield to the panic, showed its effects on them by
deeper potations, and by a recklessness of wickedness meant
to conceal their fears. With tin horns they blasphemously
affected to be angels blowing trumpets. They imitated the
Millerite meetings in their drunken sprees, and learned Mr.
Hankins's arguments by heart.

The sun of the eleventh of August rose gloriously. People
pointed to it with trembling, and said that it would rise no
more. Soon after sunrise there were crimson clouds stretching
above and below it, and popular terror seized upon this as a
sign. But the sun mounted with a scorching heat, which
showed that at least his shining power was not impaired. Then
men said, “Behold the beginning of the fervent heat that is to
melt the elements!” Night drew on, and every “shooting-star”
was a new sign of the end. The meteors, as usual at this time

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of the year, were plentiful, and the simple-hearted country-folk
were convinced that the stars were falling out of the sky.

A large bald hill overlooking the Ohio was to be the mount
of ascension. Here gathered Elder Hankins's flock with that
comfortable assurance of being the elect that only a narrow
bigotry can give. And here came others of all denominations,
consoling themselves that they were just as well off if they were
Christians as if they had made all this fuss about the millennium.
Here was August, too, now almost well, joining with the rest in
singing those sweet and inspiring Adventist hymns. His German
heart could not keep still where there was singing, and now, in
gratefulness at new-found health, he was more inclined to music
than ever. So he joined heartily and sincerely in the song that
begins:

When the concourse reached the lines,


“The saints have heard the midnight cry,
Go meet him in the air!”
neither August nor any one else could well resist the infection
of the profound and awful belief in the immediate coming of the
end which pervaded the throng. Strong men and women wept
and shouted with the excitement.

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Then Elder Hankins exhorted a little. He said that the time
was short. But men's hearts were hard. As in the days of the
flood, they were marrying and giving in marriage. Not half a
mile away a wedding was at that time taking place, and a man
who called himself a minister could not discern the signs of the
times, but was solemnizing a marriage.

This allusion was to the marriage of Jonas, which was to take
place that very evening at the castle. Mrs. Anderson had refused
to have “such wicked nonsense” at her house, and as Cynthy
had no home, Andrew had appointed it at the castle, partly to
oblige Jonas, partly from habitual opposition to Abigail, but
chiefly to express his contempt for Adventism.

Mrs. Anderson herself was in a state of complete sublimation.
She had sent for Norman, that she might get him ready for
the final judgment, and Norman, without the slightest inclination
to be genuinely religious, was yet a coward, and made a provisional
repentance, not meant to hold good if Elder Hankins's
figures should fail; just such a repentance as many a man has
made on what he supposed to be his death-bed. Do not I
remember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and
myself, who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think
that he had been “such a fool as to send for the preacher”?

Now, between Mrs. Anderson's joy at Norman's conversion,
and her delight that the world would soon be at an end and
she on the winning side, and her anticipation of the pleasure
she would feel even in heaven in saying, “I told you so!” to
her unbelieving friends, she quite forgot Julia. In fact she
went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another, falling into
trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriously
called “the power.” She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia,

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for there were but three more hours of time, and she felt that
the goal was already gained, and she had carried her point to
the very last. A satisfaction for a saint!

The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge
of the surging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted
together.

“Let us go and see Jonas married,” said August. “It is no
harm. God can take us to heaven from one place as well as
another, if we are His children.”

In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say disgusted,
with her mother's peculiar religious exercises, and she
gladly escaped with August to the castle and the wedding of
her faithful friends.

Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle
look as flowery and festive as possible. The wedding took place
in the lower story, but the library was illuminated and the
Adventists who had occasion to pass by Andrew's on their way to
the rendezvous accepted this as a new fulfillment of prophecy to
the very letter. They nodded one to another, and said, “See!
marrying and giving in marriage, as in the days of Noah!”

August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much
on their way to the castle. But in these last hours of a world
grown old and ready for its doom, they cleaved closer together.
There could be neither heaven nor millennium for one of them
without the other! Loving one another made them love God
the more, and love cast out all fear. If this was the Last, they
would face it together, and if it proved the Beginning, they
would rejoice together. At sight of every shooting meteor,
Julia clung almost convulsively to August.

When they entered the castle, Jonas and Cynthy were already

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standing up before the presiding elder, and he was about to begin.
Cynthy's face showed her sense of the awfulness of marrying at a
moment of such fearful expectation, or perhaps she was troubling
herself for fear that so much happiness out of heaven was
to be had only in the commission of a capital sin. But, like
most people whose consciences are stronger than their intellects,
she found great consolation in taking refuge under the wing of
ecclesiastical authority. To be married by a presiding elder
was the best thing in the world next to being married by a
bishop.

Whatever fear of the swift-coming judgment others might
have felt, the benignant old elder was at peace. Commonsense,
a clean conscience, and a child-like faith enlightened his
countenance, and since he tried to be always ready, and since
his meditations made the things of the other life ever present,
his pulse would scarcely have quickened if he had felt sure that
the archangel's trump would sound in an hour. He neither felt
the subdued fear shown on the countenance of Cynthy Ann, nor
the strong skeptical opposition of Andrew, whose face of late had
grown almost into a sneer.

“Do you take this woman to be your lawful and wedded
wife—”

And before the elder could finish it, Jonas blurted out, “You'd
better believe I do, my friend.”

And then when the old man smiled and finished his question
down to, “so long as ye both shall live,” Jonas responded
eagerly, “Tell death er the jedgment-day, long or short.”

And Cynthy Ann answered demurely out of her frightened
but too happy heart, and the old man gave them his benediction
in an apostolic fashion that removed Cynthy Ann's scruples, and

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smoothed a little of the primness out of her face, so that she
almost smiled when Jonas said, “Well! it's done now, and
it can't be undone fer all the Goshorns in Christendom er
creation!”

And then the old gentleman—for he was a gentleman, though
he had always been a backwoodsman—spoke of the excitement,
and said that it was best always to be ready—to be ready
to live, and then you would be ready for death or the judgment.
That very night the end might come, but it was not best to
trouble one's self about it. And he smiled, and said that it was
none of his business, God could manage the universe; it was for
him to be found doing his duty as a faithful servant. And then it
would be just like stepping out of one door into another,
whenever death or the judgment should come.

While the old man was getting ready to leave, Julia and August
slipped away, fearing lest their absence should be discovered.
But the peacefulness of the old elder's face had entered
into their souls, and they wished that they too were solemnly
pronounced man and wife, with so sweet a benediction upon
their union.

“I do not feel much anxious about the day of judgment
or the millennium,” said August, whose idiom was sometimes
a little broken. “When I was so near dying I felt satisfied
to die after you had kissed my lips. But now that it seems we
have come upon the world's last days, I wish I were married to
you. I do not know how things will be in the new heaven and
the new earth. But I should like you to be my wife there,
or at least to have been my wife on earth, if only for one hour.”

And then he proposed that they should be made man and wife
now in the world's last hour. It was not wrong. It could not

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give her mother heart-disease, for she would not know of it till
she should hear it in the land where there are neither marriages
nor sickness. Julia could not see any sin in her disobedience
under such circumstances. She did so much want to go into the
New Jerusalem as the wedded wife of August “the grand,”
as she fondly called him.

And so in the stillness of that awful night they walked back
to Andrew's castle, and found the venerable preacher, with saddle-bags
on his arm, ready to mount his horse, for the presiding
elder of that day had no leisure time. Jonas and Cynthy stood
bidding him good-by. And the old man was saying again that if
we were always ready it would be like stepping from one door
into another. But he thought it as wrong to waste time gazing
up into heaven to see Christ come, as it had been to gaze after
Him when He went away. Even Jonas's voice was a little softened
by the fearful thought ever present of the coming on of
that awful midnight of the eleventh of August. All were surprised
to see the two young people come back.

“Father Williams,” said August, “we thought we should
like to go into the New Jerusalem man and wife. Will you
marry us?”

“Sensible to the last!” cried Jonas.

“According to the laws of this State,” said Mr. Williams, “you
can not be married without a license from the clerk of the county.
Have you a license?”

“No,” said August, his heart sinking.

Just then Andrew came up and inquired what the conversation
was about.

“Why, Uncle Andrew,” said Julia eagerly, “August and I
don't want the end of the world to come without being man and

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wife. And we have no license, and August could not go seven
miles and back to get a license before midnight. It is too bad,
isn't it? If it wasn't that we think the end of the world is so
near, I should be ashamed to say how much I want to be married.
But I shall be proud to have been August's wife, when I
am among the angels.”

“You are a noble woman,” said Andrew. “Come in, let us
see if anything can be done.” And he led the way, smiling.

p555-269

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