er of Oakwell Hall, and tell a
story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is
approached. Captain Batt was believed to be far away; his family was at
Oakwell; when in the dusk, one winter evening, he came stalking along the
lane, and through the hall, and up the stairs, into his own room, where
he vanished. He had been killed in a duel in London that very same
afternoon of December 9th, 1684.

The stones of the Hall formed part of the more ancient vicarage, which an
ancestor of Captain Batt's had seized in the troublous times for property
which succeeded the Reformation. This Henry Batt possessed himself of
houses and money without scruple; and, at last, stole the great bell of
Birstall Church, for which sacrilegious theft a fine was imposed on the
land, and has to be paid by the owner of the Hall to this day.

But the Oakwell property passed out of the hands of the Batts at the
beginning of the last century; collateral descendants succeeded, and left
this picturesque trace of their having been. In the great hall hangs a
mighty pair of stag's horns, and dependent from them a printed card,
recording the fact that, on the 1st of September, 1763, there was a great
hunting-match, when this stag was slain; and that fourteen gentlemen
shared in the chase, and dined on the spoil in that hall, along with
Fairfax Fearneley, Esq., the owner. The fourteen names are given,
doubtless "mighty men of yore;" but, among them all, Sir Fletcher Norton,
Attorney-General, and Major-General Birch were the only ones with which I
had any association in 1855. Passing on from Oakwell there lie houses
right and left, which were well known to Miss Bronte when she lived at
Roe Head, as the hospitable homes of some of her school-fellows. Lanes
branch off for three or four miles to heaths and commons on the higher
ground, which formed pleasant walks on holidays, and then comes the white
gate into the field-path leading to Roe Head itself.

One of the bow-windowed rooms on the ground floor with the pleasant look-
out I have described was the drawing-room; the other was the schoolroom.
The dining-room was on one side of the door, and faced the road.

The number of pupils, during the year and a half Miss Bronte was there,
ranged from seven to ten; and as they did not require the whole of the
house for their accommodation, the third story was unoccupied, except by
the ghostly idea of a lady, whose rustling silk gown was sometim