Chapter (1)

Rapping out its massages as the spirits of this very year last past supernaturally deficient in originality rapped 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 the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chikens of the cock lane brood.

France less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident rolled with exceeding smoothnesss down hill making paper money and speding it. Under the guidance of her christian pastors she entertained herself besides with such humane achievement as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers and his body burned alive becouse he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty processsion of monks which passed within his view at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees When that suffers was put to death already marked by the woodman fate to come down and be sawn into boards to make a certain movable 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 lands adjacent to paris there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs and roosted in by poultry , which the farmer, Death had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the revolution . But that woodman and that farmer though they works unceasingly work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread the rather forasmch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake was to be athesitical and traitorouse.