One member out of most of the families of the parish was bidden to the funeral, and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged the church and churchyard. Two mourners deserve special notice. The one was a village girl that had been betrayed, seduced, and cast away. In Mrs. Nicholls she had found a holy sister, who ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter was the grief of this young woman, and sincere her mourning. The other was a blind girl living some four miles from Haworth, who loved the deceased so dearly that she implored those about her to lead her along the roads, and over the moors, that she might listen to the solemn words, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” _MERITS AS A NOVELIST._ In the real distinguished from the ideal school of fiction, Mrs. Nicholls, known to the literary world as Currer Bell, attained immediate and lasting popularity. We purpose to notice a few of her leading characteristics, and to define briefly but articulately, the worth of her teaching. An eminent and genial critic justly remarks: “Currer Bell professed to be no idle entertainer. She did not, indeed, tag on a moral to the end of her book—else it had been little worth; or even blazon it on its surface. But she professed to write truly, to show living men and women meeting the exigencies, grappling with the problems, of real existence; to point out how the battle goes, in the circles of English middle life, between pretension and reality, between falsehood and truth. If we were content to listen to her as a historian, she relinquished with a smile the laurel of the romancer.” Her plots possess the merit of rare interest; her characters, however eccentric, stand out as unmistakable realities. True, the plot in the “Professor,” her first prose work, which met with so many refusals, and was not published till after her death, is of no great interest. Although she has never surpassed two or three portraits there sketched, it will not bear comparison with her other works.