"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman [Tabitha, using her Haworth Yorkshire dialect], and being told there is:--"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t'one t'other: and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?" "... Not all--for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak German...." "And what good does it do you?" "We mean to teach it some time--or at least the elements, as they say; and then we shall get more money than we do now." "Varry like; but give ower studying: ye've done enough for to-night." "I think we have.... I wonder when St. John [the Rev. Patrick Brontë] will come home." "Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten" (looking at a little gold watch she drew from her girdle). "It rains fast. Hannah, will you have the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?" Charlotte seems to have portrayed particularly those happy months at home in 1842, when, after the death of their aunt, all three sisters were together and their brother Branwell was away. It is Anne Brontë who, as Mary Rivers, consults her watch. For the circumstances in which she acquired this gold watch see the will of Miss Elizabeth Branwell, her aunt.[40] The woman [Tabitha] rose: she opened a door, ... soon I heard her stir the fire in an inner room. She presently came back: "Ah childer!" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond room now: it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back in a corner." The Brontë sisters were "always children in the eyes of Tabitha." Continuing her description of her sisters, Charlotte as Jane says:-- Both were fair complexioned and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction and intelligence. One [Emily Brontë] to be sure had hair a shade darker than the other, and there was a difference in their style of wearing it: Mary's [Anne Brontë's] pale brown locks were parted and braided smooth; Diana's [Emily Brontë's] duskier tresses covered her neck with thick curls.... [She] had a voice toned to my ear, like the cooing of a dove. She possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole face seemed to me full of charm, Mary's [Anne Brontë's] countenance was equally intelligent--her features equally pretty; but her expression was more reserved; and her manner, though gentle, more distant. Diana looked and spoke with a certain authority [it was Emily Brontë's manner]: she had a will.... It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers; and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.