Excerpt from Christie's Choice<br><br>There were many signs and portents construed by the superstitious as foreboding the speedy end of all things. Earthquakes, pestilences, famines, wars and rumors of wars - all these had come to verify the prophecy that such calamities would precede the final dissolution of the planet on which we live. Only the previous year Europe had been the scene of a bloody struggle, and now the tocsin of alarm had been sounded in our own land. John Brown had made his famous raid at Harper's Ferry, and whispers of attempts at insurrection among the negroes were afloat in the air. Small wonder was it that the ignorant connected this freak of nature with the disturbances which threatened an upheaval of society such as the world had never known.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.