'rithmetic preacher can't make a finishment of this sub_lu_nary speer by
addition, he'll do it by multiplyin'. They's only one answer in his
book. Gin him any sum you please, and it all comes out 1843!"

Now in all the region round about Sugar Grove school-house there was a
great dearth of sensation. The people liked the prospect of the end of
the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the
fearful monotony of their lives. Funerals and weddings were commonplace,
and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the
end of the world, as described by Elder Hankins, unless it had been a
first-class circus (with two camels and a cage of monkeys attached, so
that scrupulous people might attend from a laudable desire to see the
menagerie!) A murder would have been delightful to the people of Clark
township. It would have given them something to think and talk about.
Into this still pool Elder Hankins threw the vials, the trumpets, the
thunders, the beast with ten horns, the he-goat, and all the other
apocalyptic symbols understood in an absurdly literal way. The world was
to come to an end in the following August. Here was an excitement,
something worth living for.

All the way to their homes the people disputed learnedly about the "time
and times and a half," about "the seven heads and ten horns," and the
seventh vial. The fierce polemical discussions and the bold sectarian
dogmatism of the day had taught them anything but "the modesty of true
science," and now the unsolvable problems of the centuries were taken
out of the hands of puzzled scholars and settled as summarily and
positively as the relative merits of "gourd-seed" and "flint" corn.
Samuel Anderson had always planted his corn in the "light" of the moon
and his potatoes in the "dark" of that orb, had always killed his hogs
when the moon was on the increase lest the meat should all go to gravy,