The secrecy which Joe was compelled to observe on religious subjects was a restraint through which he would gladly have broken; but there was not one to whom he could communicate his sceptical views without fear of an explosion of alarm. Observance of caution being repulsive to his feelings, it was, therefore, natural that his real sentiments should occasionally escape. Only, however, when the gross superstitions of his daily associates excited very strong disgust within him, did Joe utterly forget his rules of caution. His fellow-apprentices were in little danger of imbibing heretical opinions, from the fact of their understandings being too uninformed to apprehend the real drift of his thinkings when expressed. But Dame Deborah pondered on some of these hasty expressions of opinion, until her aged heart often ached with the suspicion that all was not right in the new religious state of her foster-son. Yet, when she marked the tenour of his daily conduct,--his inviolable regard for truth,--his steady rebuke of every thing coarse and unfeeling,--when she listened to the language in which his conceptions, even on ordinary subjects, were uttered,--and when she contrasted his manly cheerfulness with his former gloom and despondency, a confidence arose that dispelled her temporary doubts of the correctness of his heart, and her bosom glowed with pride at the remembrance that she had adopted him for her own. During the concluding five years of his apprenticeship, Joe had piled together in his mind, though after no prescribed rule, much knowledge of a multifarious character. The acquirement of one of the noble languages of antiquity was his severest unassisted struggle during this probationary course; but it was a strife from which he reaped the richest after-pleasures. The facts he gleaned from history were stored up faithfully in his memory, not merely as chronological items, but as texts for fertile and profitable reflection; while he assiduously strove to catch the rays of such new truths as were perceptible in his more limited reading of ethics, and to evince their spirit in his thoughts and actions. Thus, without written pattern or oral instructor, the orphan apprentice endeavoured, by the selection of such materials as lay within his grasp, to build up, within himself, a mental fabric of seemly architecture. But, to cut short observations that are already too protracted,--Joe, with all his efforts after mental discipline, was, at twenty-one, what all the lonely self-educated must be at that age, often the slave of his own hypothesis when he believed himself to be following the most legitimate deductions from an authenticated fact,--oftener a visionary than a true philosopher.