A short cut across Rumbles Moor brings us to the road to Keighley, the last link in the chain of manufacturing towns stretching up the Aire from Leeds and which we must pass to reach Haworth, a name that suggests to anyone conversant with English letters the gifted but unfortunate Bronte family. Haworth has no doubt been influenced in population and activity by its busy neighbor, Keighley, but the "four tough scrambling miles" that Charles Dickens found on his visit a third of a century ago still lie between. The whole distance is a continual climb, terminating at the top of the hill, to which the old town seems to cling rather precariously. Indeed, there were few more forbidding ascents that confronted us than this terribly steep, rough street--so steep that the paving stones have been set on edge to enable the horses to climb it. It is bordered with old-world buildings, gray and weather-beaten, and forms a fit avenue to the church that dominates the town from the hill and whose massive square tower looks far over the desolate moorlands beyond it. We visited hundreds of ancient churches in England and the surroundings of many were somber and even depressing, but surely none approached Haworth churchyard in the deep, all-pervading gloom that hovered over the blackened and thickly clustered gravestones and dimmed the very sunlight that struggled through the trees which encircle the place. The hilltop is given up to the churchyard and there seems to be scarcely room for another grave, so thickly stand the mouldering memorials, which mostly antedate the time of the Brontes. Out beyond, to the westward, lie the wild black and purple moors, sweeping away even higher than the church itself and ending in a long wave of hills rippling darkly against the horizon. When "Jane Eyre," published in 1847, astonished the literary world, few indeed would have guessed that the humble authoress lived in this lonely village, then by far lonelier and more remote than it is today; and it is still a wonder how one with such surroundings and of such limited experience was able to fathom life so deeply. But one need not be at a loss to account for the strain of melancholy that runs through the writings of the gifted sisters. The isolated, dreary village, the church and rectory, then almost ruinous, the desolate moor lands and the family tragedy--the only son dying an irreclaimable drunkard--might furnish a background of gloom even for Wuthering Heights. The sisters rest in early graves, Charlotte, the eldest, dying last, in 1855, at the age of thirty-nine. All, together with the father and unhappy brother, are buried in Haworth churchyard save Anne, who lies in St. Mary's at Scarborough. [Illustration: HAWORTH CHURCH.]