re more
than sorry--they were indignant. They declared that the infliction of
ever so slight a punishment on Charlotte Bronte was unjust--for who had
tried to do her duty like her?--and testified their feeling in a variety
of ways, until Miss W---, who was in reality only too willing to pass
over her good pupil's first fault, withdrew the bad mark; and the girls
all returned to their allegiance except "Mary," who took her own way
during the week or two that remained of the half-year, choosing to
consider that Miss W---, in giving Charlotte Bronte so long a task, had
forfeited her claim to obedience of the school regulations.

The number of pupils was so small that the attendance to certain subjects
at particular hours, common in larger schools, was not rigidly enforced.
When the girls were ready with their lessons, they came to Miss W--- to
say them. She had a remarkable knack of making them feel interested in
whatever they had to learn. They set to their studies, not as to tasks
or duties to be got through, but with a healthy desire and thirst for
knowledge, of which she had managed to make them perceive the relishing
savour. They did not leave off reading and learning as soon as the
compulsory pressure of school was taken away. They had been taught to
think, to analyse, to reject, to appreciate. Charlotte Bronte was happy
in the choice made for her of the second school to which she was sent.
There was a robust freedom in the out-of-doors life of her companions.
They played at merry games in the fields round the house: on Saturday
half-holidays they went long scrambling walks down mysterious shady
lanes, then climbing the uplands, and thus gaining extensive views over
the country, about which so much had to be told, both of its past and
present history.

Miss W--- must have had in great perfection the French art, "conter," to
judge from her pupil's recollections of the tales she related during
these long walks, of this old house, or that new mill, and of the states
of society consequent on the changes involved by the suggestive dates of
either building. She remembered the times when watchers or wakeners in
the night heard the distant word of command, and the measured tramp of
thousands of sad desperate men receiving a surreptitious military
training, in preparation for some great day which they saw in their
visions, when right should struggle with might and come off victorious:
when the people of England, repre