an spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine
of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold
and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took
possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room
in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her
for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early
Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of
their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and
originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before
Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the
day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in
taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six
years old each little Bronte had its view of the political situation;
and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out
their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small
and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood
about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth,
of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria
and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has
been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron,
the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early
Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under
affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal
nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive
drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson,
indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the
perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the
flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one
after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were
laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontes. They had another
destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that s