Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/78

 He built a Temple of which Miss Amelia Bossert's description remains. It was eight-sided, without windows, and possessed a single door. Inside there were no dividing walls, but only draperies and curtains. What light there was came through the roof, which rose to a height of a hundred feet in a gigantic dome-topped tower that was visible for miles across the flat prairie from any part of New Jerusalem. Near it he built the Ecclesiastical Palace, a rambling wooden house painted white, that was to shelter his wife, his six daughters, his seven sons and daughters-in-law and his eighteen legitimate grandchildren. It was the first house his tired wife had known in forty years and when it was finished she took to a bed placed near a window that gave out on the square before the Temple. There she lived, wearing out her tired life in watching with dimmed but uncomplaining eyes this strange thing built up out of nothing by the strange man she had loved and despised for nearly forty years. Neither the thing nor the man had she ever understood.

When the Temple and the Palace were finished there was a great service in the open air. Cyrus Spragg was photographed and took leave of his followers and entered into the Temple, to pass eternity in repose and meditation. God, he told them, would rule New Jerusalem through His instrument, Cyrus Spragg. He would send out revelations from time to time administering the sowing of crops and price of grain and the shearing of sheep. As God's instrument, Cyrus Spragg could not die. He would live forever in the depths of the