ertainment of others. Popular admiration was sweet to him.
And this led to his presence being sought at "arvills" and all the great
village gatherings, for the Yorkshiremen have a keen relish for
intellect; and it likewise procured him the undesirable distinction of
having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any
chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his
liquor. "Do you want some one to help you with your bottle, sir? If you
do, I'll send up for Patrick" (so the villagers called him till the day
of his death, though in his own family he was always "Branwell"). And
while the messenger went, the landlord entertained his guest with
accounts of the wonderful talents of the boy, whose precocious
cleverness, and great conversational powers, were the pride of the
village. The attacks of ill health to which Mr. Bronte had been subject
of late years, rendered it not only necessary that he should take his
dinner alone (for the sake of avoiding temptations to unwholesome diet),
but made it also desirable that he should pass the time directly
succeeding his meals in perfect quiet. And this necessity, combined with
due attention to his parochial duties, made him partially ignorant how
his son employed himself out of lesson-time. His own youth had been
spent among people of the same conventional rank as those into whose
companionship Branwell was now thrown; but he had had a strong will, and
an earnest and persevering ambition, and a resoluteness of purpose which
his weaker son wanted.

It is singular how strong a yearning the whole family had towards the art
of drawing. Mr. Bronte had been very solicitous to get them good
instruction; the girls themselves loved everything connected with it--all
descriptions or engravings of great pictures; and, in default of good
ones, they would take and analyse any print or drawing which came in
their way, and find out how much thought had gone to its composition,
what ideas it was intended to suggest, and what it _did_ suggest. In the
same spirit, they laboured to design imaginations of their own; they
lacked the power of execution, not of conception. At one time, Charlotte
had the notion of making her living as an artist, and wearied her eyes in
drawing with pre-Raphaelite minuteness, but not with pre-Raphaelite
accuracy, for she drew from fancy rather than from nature.

But they all thought there could be no doubt about Branwell's tale