When gentle, Bessie seemed to me the ... kindest being in the world;... I wished ... intensely ... she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never push about or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was ... wont to do. Bessie Lee[23] must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative; so, at least, I judge from the impression made upon me by her nursery tales.... But she had a capricious and hasty temper and indifferent ideas of principle or justice ["Hannah" would have driven off the destitute Jane Eyre], still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one else at Gateshead Hall. "Mrs. Dean"[24] in her turn says of "Catherine"--Charlotte Brontë:-- "She was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once and she defying us.... I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance; she never took an aversion to me though." In Chap. IV. of _Jane Eyre_ Bessie says to Jane Eyre, after the latter has asked her not to scold:-- "Well, I will, but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak sharply." "I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you." Jane suggests Bessie dislikes her, to which is replied:-- "I don't dislike you.... I believe I am fonder of you than of all the others." "You don't show it." "You sharp little thing!... What makes you so venturesome and hardy?" The idiosyncratic appeal Tabitha Aykroyd made to Charlotte is related identically wherever she is portrayed. That Charlotte Brontë had been initially entranced by her fairy tales, and the old songs she sang, is shown more especially in the phases she gives of Tabitha as Bessie and as Ellen Dean. Thus we read in _Jane Eyre_, Chap. IV., in the close of the scene just given:-- "That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; ... in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchaining stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine." And in _Wuthering Heights_, Chap. XXII., Ellen Dean says of Miss Catherine Linton (see my reference to this character as a phase of Charlotte Brontë, in my preface):--"From dinner to tea she would lie doing nothing except singing old songs--my nursery lore--to herself, ... half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express." So in the same work, Chap. XXIV., the same Catherine says:--"He was charmed with two or three pretty songs [I sang]--_your_ songs, Ellen." The italics are Charlotte Brontë's. _Jane Eyre_, Chap. III., says:-- Bessie had now finished ... tidying the room ... she sang:-- "In the days we went agipsying A long time ago."