By her Method II.: altering the age of a character portrayed, Charlotte Brontë gives us Tabitha Aykroyd as a young woman in Bessie; and by the same Method II, in the scene just read from _Wuthering Heights_, we have an instance of her presenting, as an incident in womanhood, an incident which the testimony of _Jane Eyre_ and other evidences show occurred really in Charlotte's own childhood. As she relates in _Jane Eyre_, her dread was "such dread as children only can feel"; and she goes on to say "this incident [of the locked room] gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day." Thus in both _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte paints an excellent picture of the matter-of-fact but good-hearted Tabitha Aykroyd going to the room in response to her, Charlotte Brontë's, frantic appeal, sceptical and certainly unsympathetic. The part played by the wild summoning of Tabitha to the room, the references to "a fit," the ghost and haunted chamber, the dread of the mirror, the suggestion that the frenzy of fear was wilfully assumed, the piercing scream, Tabitha Aykroyd with her basin and her final suggestion of sleep, are in themselves ample evidence that Charlotte Brontë in both _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ drew this scene from an experience of the kind in her own childhood. In each work stress is laid by her upon her own hypersensitiveness, and we learn how the Brontë household misunderstood her excessive passionateness and misread it as wicked acting[26]. We see Tabitha best in Mrs. Dean of _Wuthering Heights_, as Hannah of the Rivers family of _Jane Eyre_, and by Currer Bell's Method II., alteration of age of the character portrayed, as Bessie of that work. Tabitha Aykroyd lives and breathes her life through the pages of Charlotte Brontë's _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ to-day, and ever will she remain in literature, a real Yorkshire woman amazingly translated from the wide Yorkshire hearth with its great, wind-whitened fire and smell of hot cakes, to the pages of two of the finest examples of the English novel. Her portrayal I declare to be one of the most admirable achievements in the works of Charlotte Brontë. CHAPTER VI. CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S CHILD APPARITION IN "THE PROFESSOR," "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND "JANE EYRE." Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontë biographer, relates that a friend of Charlotte Brontë said Charlotte had told her "a misfortune was often preceded by the dream which she gives to Jane Eyre of carrying a wailing child. She, Charlotte Brontë, described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing.... The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was ... present to susceptible people...." This in the main explains the origin of the child-apparition as an omen of disaster in Charlotte Brontë's works.