The town of Denver formed a little world apart. Miracles were in the air, faith was the only subject of conversation, and everyone dreamed of celestial joys and the grace of salvation. In this supernatural atmosphere distinctions between the possible and the impossible were lost sight of, and the inhabitants believed that the usual order of nature had been overthrown. For instance, James Eckman of Leadville, who had been blinded by an explosion, recovered his sight immediately he arrived at Denver. General Test declared that he had seen a legless cripple _walk_ when the saint's gaze was bent upon him. A blind engineer named Stainthorp became able to see daylight. A man named Dillon, bent and crippled by an illness several decades before, recovered instantaneously. When the saint touched him, he felt a warmth throughout his whole body; his fingers, which he had not been able to use for years, suddenly straightened themselves; he was conscious of a sensation of inexpressible rapture, and rose up full of faith and joy. A man named Welsh, of Colorado Springs, had a paralysed right hand which was immediately cured when Schlatter touched it. All New Mexico rejoiced in the heavenly blessing that had fallen upon Denver. Special trains disgorged thousands of travellers, who were caught up in the wave of religious enthusiasm directly they arrived. The whole town was flooded with a sort of exaltation, and there was a recrudescence of childishly superstitious beliefs, which broke out with all the spontaneity and vigour that usually characterises the manifestation of popular religious phenomena. What would have been the end of it if Schlatter had not so decisively and inexplicably disappeared? It would be difficult to conceive of anything more extraordinary than the exploits of this modern saint, which came near to revolutionising the whole religious life of the New World. The fact that they took place against a modern background, with the aid of newspaper interviews and special trains, gives them a peculiar _cachet_. Indeed, the spectacle of such child-like faith, allied to all the excesses of civilisation, and backed up by the ground-work of prejudices from which man has as yet by no means freed himself, is one to provide considerable food for reflection for those who study the psychology of crowds in general, and of religious mania in particular. The case of Schlatter is not a difficult one to diagnose. He suffered from "ambulatory automatism," the disease investigated by Professor Pitres of Bordeaux, and was a wanderer from his childhood up. Incapable of resisting the lure of vagabondage, he thought it should be possible to perform miracles because it was "God his Father" who thus forced him to wander from place to place. "All nature being directed according to His Will," said Schlatter, "and nothing being accomplished without Him, I am driven to warn the earth in order to fulfil His designs."