even!) "in the children's study with a
newspaper or a periodical, and be able to tell anyone everything when
she came out, debates in parliament, and I know not what all."

Mr. Bronte wished to make the children hardy, and indifferent to the
pleasures of eating and dress. His strong passionate nature was in
general compressed down with resolute stoicism. Mrs. Bronte, whose sweet
spirit thought invariably on the bright side, would say: "Ought I not to
be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?"

In September, 1821, Mrs. Bronte died, and the lives of those quiet
children must have become quieter and lonelier still. Their father did
not require companionship, and the daughters grew out of childhood into
girlhood bereft in a singular manner of such society as would have been
natural to their age, sex and station. The children did not want
society. To small infantine gaieties they were unaccustomed. They were
all in all to each other. They had no children's books, but their eager
minds "browsed undisturbed among the wholesome pasturage of English
literature," as Charles Lamb expressed it.

Their father says of their childhood that "since they could read and
write they used to invent and act little plays of their own, in which
the Duke of Wellington, Charlotte's hero, was sure to come off
conqueror. When the argument got warm I had sometimes to come in as
arbitrator." Long before Maria Bronte died, at the age of eleven, her
father used to say he could converse with her on any topic with as much
freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person.

In 1824, the four elder girls were admitted as pupils to Cowan Bridge
School for the daughters of clergymen, where they were half starved amid
the most insanitary surroundings. Helen Burns in "Jane Eyre" is as exact
a transcript of Maria Bronte as Charlotte's wonderful power of
representing character could give. In 1825 both Maria and Elizabeth died
of consumption, and Charlotte was suddenly called from school into the
responsibilities of the eldest sister in a motherless family.

At the end of the year, Charlotte and Emily returned home, where
Branwell was being taught by his father, and their aunt, Miss Branwell,
who acted as housekeeper, taught them what she could. An immense amount
of manuscript dating from this period is in existence--tales, dramas,
poems, romances, written principally by Charlotte, in a hand it is
almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magni