Chapter 1. The Period. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light. It was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. We were all going direct to heaven. We were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face on the throne of England. There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the state preserves of loaves and fishes that things in general were settled forever. It was the year of our Lord 1775. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favored period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her 5 and 20th blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the lifeguards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing arrangements for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the cocklaying ghost had been laid only around a dozen of years after wrapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last passed, supernaturally deficient in originality, wrapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English crown and people from a congress of British subjects in America, which, strange to relate, have proved more important to human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the cocklaying brood. France, less favored on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness downhill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastor, she entertained herself. Besides, with such humane achievements as her brother's, she was sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honor to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view at a distance of some 50 or 60 yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the woodman's fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain moveable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy