nstances of eccentricity in the father because I hold
the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the
life of his daughter.

Mrs. Bronte died in September, 1821, and the lives of those quiet
children must have become quieter and lonelier still. Charlotte tried
hard, in after years, to recall the remembrance of her mother, and could
bring back two or three pictures of her. One was when, sometime in the
evening light, she had been playing with her little boy, Patrick
Branwell, in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage. But the recollections of
four or five years old are of a very fragmentary character.

Owing to some illness of the digestive organs, Mr. Bronte was obliged to
be very careful about his diet; and, in order to avoid temptation, and
possibly to have the quiet necessary for digestion, he had begun, before
his wife's death, to take his dinner alone--a habit which he always
retained. He did not require companionship, therefore he did not seek
it, either in his walks, or in his daily life. The quiet regularity of
his domestic hours was only broken in upon by church-wardens, and
visitors on parochial business; and sometimes by a neighbouring
clergyman, who came down the hills, across the moors, to mount up again
to Haworth Parsonage, and spend an evening there. But, owing to Mrs.
Bronte's death so soon after her husband had removed into the district,
and also to the distances, and the bleak country to be traversed, the
wives of these clerical friends did not accompany their husbands; and the
daughters grew up out of childhood into girlhood bereft, in a singular
manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex,
and station.

But the children did not want society. To small infantine gaieties they
were unaccustomed. They were all in all to each other. I do not suppose
that there ever was a family more tenderly bound to each other. Maria
read the newspapers, and reported intelligence to her younger sisters
which it is wonderful they could take an interest in. But I suspect that
they had no "children's books," and that their eager minds "browzed
undisturbed among the wholesome pasturage of English literature," as
Charles Lamb expresses it. The servants of the household appear to have
been much impressed with the little Brontes' extraordinary cleverness. In
a letter which I had from him on this subject, their father writes:--"The
servants often said that they had ne