iption
which I shall be possessed of at my death for his own absolute
benefit_; _And I make him my sole executor_; _And I revoke all former
and other Wills_, _in witness whereof I_, _the said_ PATRICK BRONTE,
_have to this my last Will_, _contained in this sheet of paper_, _set
my hand this twentieth day of June_, _one thousand eight hundred and
fifty-five_.

PATRICK BRONTE.--_Signed and acknowledged by the said_ PATRICK BRONTE
_as his Will in the presence of us present at the same time_, _and
who in his presence and in the presence of each other have hereunto
subscribed our names as witnesses_: JOSEPH REDMAN, ELIZA BROWN.

The Irish relatives are not forgotten, and indeed this will gives the
most direct evidence of the fact that for the sixty years that he had
been absent from his native land he had always kept his own country, or
at least his relatives in County Down, sufficiently in mind.

CHAPTER II: CHILDHOOD

Eighty years have passed over Thornton since that village had the honour
of becoming the birthplace of Charlotte Bronte. The visitor of to-day
will find the Bell Chapel, in which Mr. Bronte officiated, a mere ruin,
and the font in which his children were baptized ruthlessly exposed to
the winds of heaven. {56a} The house in which Patrick Bronte resided is
now a butcher's shop, and indeed little, one imagines, remains the same.
But within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find,
with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the Bronte children.
There, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the
neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries, {56b} differing from
their neighbours only by the fact that Mr. Morgan or Mr. Fennell came to
the help of their relatives and officiated in place of Mr. Bronte. Mr.
Bronte, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to
Haworth when Anne was baptized.

There were, it is well known, two elder children, Maria and Elizabeth,
born at Hartshead, and doomed to die speedily at Haworth. A vague memory
of Maria lives in the Helen Burns of _Jane Eyre_, but the only tangible
records of the pair, as far as I am able to ascertain, are a couple of
samplers, of the kind which Mrs. Bronte and her sisters had worked at
Penzance a generation earlier.

_Maria Bronte finished this Sampler on the 16th of May at the age of
eight years_

one of them tells us, and the other: