But when, wounded beyond endurance by his violence and injustice, she withdrew for a few days from her home, and told her father she would receive no letters from him in which this friend’s name was mentioned, the old man’s cunning took the place of passion. He wrote long and affectionate letters to her on general subjects; but accompanying each letter was a little slip of paper, which professed to be a note from Charlotte’s dog, Flossy, to his “much-respected and beloved mistress,” in which the dog, declaring that he saw “a good deal of human nature that was hid from those who had the gift of language,” was made to repeat the attacks upon the obnoxious person which Mr. Brontë dared no longer to make in his own character. [Sidenote: Childhood of the Brontës.] The parson’s children were not allowed to associate with their little neighbors in the hamlet; their aunt, who came to the parsonage after their mother’s death, had scarcely more sympathy with them than their father himself; their only friend was the rough but kindly servant Tabby, who pitied the bairns without understanding them.... So they grew up strange, lonely, old-fashioned children, with absolutely no knowledge of the world outside; so quiet and demure in their habits, that years afterward, when they had invited some of their Sunday scholars up to the parsonage, and wished to amuse them, they found that they had to ask the scholars to teach them how to play--they had never learned. Carefully secluded from the rest of the world, the little Brontë children found out fashions of their own in the way of amusement, and curious fashions they were. While they were still in the nursery, when the oldest of the family, Maria, was barely nine years old, and Charlotte, the third, was just six, they had begun to take a quaint interest in literature and politics. Heaven knows who it was who first told these wonderful pigmies of the great deeds of a Wellington or the crimes of a Bonaparte; but at an age when other children are generally busy with their bricks or their dolls, and when all life’s interests are confined for them within the walls of a nursery, these marvellous Brontës were discussing the life of the Great Duke, and maintaining the Tory cause as ardently as the oldest and sturdiest of the village politicians in the neighboring inn. [Sidenote: Effect on Charlotte’s work in later life.] It may be well to bear in mind the frequency with which the critics have charged Charlotte Brontë with exaggerating the precocity of children. What we know of the early days of the Brontës proves that what would have been exaggeration in any other person was in the case of Charlotte nothing but a truthful reproduction of her own experiences. T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’ New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877. * * * * * [Sidenote: Early reading.]