The great Doctor was but a superficial critic, after all. As a rule, writers nowadays care little about incident, and in this respect the public resembles them. Given a life of average duration and condition, and we know its inseparable incidents—incidents which are the general property and experience of the human family. In our day we like better to learn what is the hidden life—to see the springs and sources of action in the individual or the community at large—what are the seeds sown in the human heart, and what the fruit they bear. Nature works slowly and in order, and miracles are, if not impossible, at any rate rare. One can quite realize the feeling of the celebrated Rammohun Roy, when he contended that miracles were not the part of the Christian dispensation best adapted to the conversion of sceptics. Be that as it may, there was nothing of the miraculous in finding the ardent preacher of the Gospel now in the camp of the scorner. That was the result of causes long working unsuspected. He had been disgusted with the narrowness of the Church and people with whom he had come in contact. The God of his youth seemed to him hard, despotic, unmerciful, and unlovely. He had been bowed down to the earth with a great sorrow. Apparently the change was not for good. Once he was a preacher; now he never darkened church doors. Once he associated with the godly; now he did nothing of the kind. In the language of the sects, now he was a son of perdition. Of course a woman was at the bottom of it all. It was in Hamburg they met. There was a fashionable English boarding-school in that ancient city, and in the course of his travels Wentworth had spent a winter there. Indeed, it was on account of the beauty of one in particular that he had stopped there wasting his time and getting over head and ears in debt. It was all an accident; going up the old Steinweg, he had seen some of the young ladies of the English school coming down. One of them was Adèle, blue-eyed, fresh and fair as the stars on a summer night. Their eyes met, and Wentworth was over head and ears in love. In a little while he managed to make the acquaintance of the lady at an evening party, where everyone was ravished with her musical genius. He was introduced to her, and found her English charming. It was evident that immense pains had been taken with her education. He had never met so brilliant a linguist before, French, German, Italian, English—in all she was equally at home. Again, he had met her at a fête without the gates, and had the honour of escorting her home. In a little while he had sent her a letter of which it is needless to describe the contents. That letter was placed in her guardian’s hands, and the result was an interview and a betrothal.