like to have you with me in Spanish America, or in France either, and see what you thought of it then.  How it ever came into mortal brains is to me the puzzle.  I’ve often fancied, when I’ve watched those priests—­and very good fellows, too, some of them are—­that there must be a devil after all abroad in the world, as you say; for no human insanity could ever have hit upon so complete and ’cute a device for making parsons do the more harm, the more good they try to do.  There, I’ve preached you a sermon, and made you angry.”

“Not in the least:  but I must go now and see some sick.”

“Well, go, and prosper; only recollect that the said sick are men and women.”

And away Tom went, thinking to himself:  “Well, that is a noble, straightforward, honest fellow, and will do yet, if he’ll only get a wife.  He’s not one of those asses who have made up their minds by book that the world is square, and won’t believe it to be round for any ocular demonstration.  He’ll find out what shape the world is before long, and behave as such, and act accordingly.”

Little did Tom think, as he went home that day in full-blown satisfaction with his sermon to Frank, of the misery he had caused, and was going to cause for many a day, to poor Grace Harvey.  It was a rude shock to her to find herself thus suspected; though perhaps it was one which she needed.  She had never, since one first trouble ten years ago, known any real grief; and had therefore had all the more time to make a luxury of unreal ones.  She was treated by the simple folk around her as all but inspired; and being possessed of real powers as miraculous in her own eyes as those which were imputed to her were in theirs (for what are real spiritual experiences but daily miracles?) she was just in that temper of mind in which she required, as ballast, all her real goodness, lest the moral balance should topple headlong after the intellectual, and the downward course of vanity, excitement, deception, blasphemous assumptions be entered on.  Happy for her that she was in Protestant and common-sense England, and in a country parish, where mesmerism and spirit-rapping were unknown.  Had she been an American, she might have become one of the most lucrative “mediums;” had she been born in a Romish country, she would have probably become an even more famous personage.  There is no reason why she should not have equalled or surpassed, the ecstasies of St. Theresa, or of St. Hildegardis, or any other sweet dreamer of sweet dreams; have founded a new order of charity, have enriched the clergy of a whole province, and have died in seven years, maddened by alternate paroxysms of self-conceit and revulsions of self-abasement.  Her own preachers and class-leaders, indeed (so do extremes meet), would not have been sorry to make use of her in somewhat the same manner, however feebly and coarsely:  but her innate self-respect and modesty had preserved her from the snares of such clumsy poachers; and more than one good-looking young preacher had fled desperately from a station where, instead of making a tool of Grace Harvey, he could only madden his own foolish heart with love for her.