s Nussey well remembers his stentorian tones as he called
out as he left his study and passed the dining-room door--'Don't be up
late, children'--which they usually were. Between these two front rooms
upstairs, and immediately over the passage, with a door facing the
staircase, was a box room; but this was the children's nursery, where for
many years the children slept, where the bulk of their little books were
compiled, and where, it is more than probable, _The Professor_ and _Jane
Eyre_ were composed.

Of the work of the Bronte children in these early years, a great deal
might be written. Mrs. Gaskell gives a list of some eighteen booklets,
but at least eighteen more from the pen of Charlotte are in existence.
Branwell was equally prolific; and of him, also, there remains an immense
mass of childish effort. That Emily and Anne were industrious in a like
measure there is abundant reason to believe; but scarcely one of their
juvenile efforts remains to us, nor even the unpublished fragments of
later years, to which reference will be made a little later. Whether
Emily and Anne on the eve of their death deliberately destroyed all their
treasures, or whether they were destroyed by Charlotte in the days of her
mourning, will never be known. Meanwhile one turns with interest to the
efforts of Charlotte and Branwell. Charlotte's little stories commence
in her thirteenth year, and go on until she is twenty-three. From
thirteen to eighteen she would seem to have had one absorbing hero. It
was the Duke of Wellington; and her hero-worship extended to the children
of the Duke, who, indeed, would seem even more than their father to have
absorbed her childish affections. Whether the stories are fairy tales or
dramas of modern life, they all alike introduce the Marquis of Douro, who
afterwards became the second Duke of Wellington, and Lord Charles
Wellesley, whose son is now the third Duke of Wellington. The length of
some of these fragments is indeed incredible. They fill but a few sheets
of notepaper in that tiny handwriting; but when copied by zealous
admirers, it is seen that more than one of them is twenty thousand words
in length.

_The Foundling_, by Captain Tree, written in 1833, is a story of
thirty-five thousand words, though the manuscript has only eighteen
pages. _The Green Dwarf_, written in the same year, is even longer, and
indeed after her return from Roe Head in 1833, Charlotte must have
devoted herself