Into this work Dow plunged with the abandon of a knight-errant, and with wonderful success. His thin, skeleton frame, pale, sharp face, luminously black eyes, long hair, curling to his waist, sharp, strident voice, fierce, jerky sentences, qualified him to add intensity to the prevalent excitement. And he was fond of appealing to the fears and superstitions of humanity. He was full of dire predictions. The world was in travail for the last day. Napoleon was wading knee-deep in the blood of Europe. The last vial of wrath seemed to have been poured out upon the earth. The prophecies and the apocalypse were drawn on for texts, which he used literally. Any local calamity—and a long list of sudden or accidental deaths within his ken—were worked upon the minds of his hearers, as links in the chain of these awful portents. If there was any “scare” in a man or woman or child, he’d frighten them to their knees. He used the _argumentum ad hominem_ liberally, and if there were a conspicuous atheist reprobate or Calvinist in the audience—all of whom he classed together—the man was sure to be singled out for direct attack. A favorite device was to ask the audience to grant him a favor, and require all who were willing to do so to stand. When up, he would bind them to pray three times a day for a week for salvation, and abjure them not to add the perjury of a broken promise to their many other sins. This he exultantly calls “catching ’em in a covenant,” he expecting to make converts of nine-tenths of those who kept the promise into which they had been thus trapped.