How American "Adventists"
Waited for the End of the World

Their leader spent his last evening dancing, then seeing nothing coming, went to bed. Some of his followers, wanting to choose their death, killed themselves as midnight approached. In Cleveland alone, six young girls killed themselves
London,
February 7 (dept. P. Parisien.) The hour of the Last Judgment was awaited, as we know, last night, at midnight, on the other side of the Atlantic, by the followers of the "Seventh Day Adventists", a new American religious cult. The wait for the great moment gave rise to scenes of a character sometimes comic, sometimes tragic.
On the comic side: Robert Reidt, one of the leaders of the sect, who sometimes calls himself the prophet, gave himself up last night, without visible apprehension, to the charms of dance music brought to him by a T.S.F. receiver. At 11:55 p.m., pretending to remember that the end of the world was near, he left his house and, contemplating the sky, remarked: "It doesn't really seem that anything is going to happen tonight, nothing unusual." And, saying this, he went phlegmatically to bed. However, for several days he had forced his wife and children to eat only carrots and clear water "so that they would have purer blood and be ready to take their place among the elect." On Patchogue Hill, in Long Island, another scene. There was a crowd of followers there who had climbed to the top as if to be closer to heaven when the time came to go to the kingdom of the angels. Midnight struck. Nothing happened. They were disappointed, but they immediately began to pray louder and more fervently for the destruction of our planet to finally come.

But here is the tragic note. We have seen, almost everywhere, in the expanse of the great Republic, people who, having believed on their word and hard as iron that, according to the word of the prophet of their sect, the end of the world was irrevocably fixed at 24 hours, had judged it wise to choose a kind of death to their liking and had killed themselves before the fatal hour. In the city of Cleveland alone, the case of six young girls is cited who, for this reason, anticipated the hour of destiny.

[The "Seventh Day Adventists" of France declare that they neither predict nor fix the end of the world.]