she was in no worse position than himself.  His tongue was fluent.  His words were like a lambent flame, playing with some indestructible material.  His mind was weak, and devoted to metaphysical speculations—­mysticisms:  the arcana coelestia of Swedenborg was Holy Writ to him.  He believed in three heavens, and their opposites.  Jane’s endeavors were directed to make him believe in a fourth heaven.  Childlike and immature in appearance, she was in character exceedingly precocious.  Her intelligence was keen and practical.  In very early years it had been instilled into her that her future welfare would depend upon her own exertions, and she never forgot the lesson.  Her uncle was very generous to her; but he was not the man to have saved money for his own offspring, if he had had any, and far less for his niece; he spent every shilling of his income.  Little Jane would secretly have preferred to receive in hard cash the sums which he lavished upon her in indulgences; she would have dispensed with her pony, and kept a steed in the stable for herself of another sort.  The rainy day was certain to come some time or other to her, and she would have liked to have made provision for it—­a difficult matter for most of us, and for her impossible.  She was wise enough, even then, to know how Uncle Hardcastle would have received any suggestion of a prudential nature, and she held her tongue.

In Leonard Yorke, if she did not comprehend his doctrine of “perpetual subsistence,” she perceived a provision for her future.  At one-and-twenty, indeed, he made his pupil his wife, to the astonishment rather than the scandal of the neighborhood.  They opined that it was only in the East, or in royal families who wedded by proxy, that brides ran so young.  Jane Hardcastle, however, was in reality eighteen years of age.

Yorke Brothers, of Birmingham, had nothing to say against the match, but they objected to a Swedenborgian partner in the iron trade, and bought their nephew at a fair price out of the business.  They did not offer to take him back again, when, five years later, he became a true believer in the faith of Mary Joanna Southcott and the coming of the young Shiloh.  This lady, whose portrait, with that of her spiritual amanuensis, hung in Mrs. Yorke’s sitting-room, had been her only rival in the affections of her husband.  She had not been jealous of her upon that account, feeling pretty certain, perhaps, that the “affinity” between them was Platonic; but she had rather grudged the money with which he had so lavishly relieved the “perplexities” of “the handmaid.”  The amanuensis used to issue I O U’s at Joanna’s dictation, to be paid with enormous interest Hereafter, and Leonard Yorke was always ready to discount her paper.  There was no one that subscribed more munificently than he did toward the famous “cradle,” or looked more devoutly for its expected tenant.  Even when that long-looked-for 19th of October had come and gone without sign, and two months later his