Some Cranks and their Crotchets 445 



numbered twenty-five or thirty men and women. 

 Their establishment consisted of one large man- 

 sard-roofed house, with barns and sheds and a 

 good-sized farm. Their housekeeping was tidy, 

 and they put up apple-sauce. They maintained 

 that the eighteen and a half centuries of the so- 

 called Christian era have really been the dispen- 

 sation of John the Baptist, and that the true 

 Christian era was ushered in by the Holy Ghost 

 in the person of Father Howland, through believ- 

 ing in whom Christians might attain to eternal life 

 on this planet. They had their Sabbath on Sat- 

 urday, and worked in the fields on Sunday ; and 

 they made sundry distinctions between clean and 

 unclean foods, based upon their slender under- 

 standing of the Old Testament. 



For a few years these worthy people enjoyed 

 the simple rural life on their pleasant hillside with- 

 out having their dream of immortality rudely 

 tested. When one member fell ill and died, and 

 was presently followed by another, it was easy to 

 dispose of such cases by asserting that the de- 

 ceased were not true believers ; they were black 

 sheep, hypocrites, pretenders, whited sepulchres, 

 and their deaths had purified the flock. But the 

 next one to die was Father Howland himself. On 

 a warm summer day of 1874, as he was driving in 



