Then follow pictures of the life at Haworth Parsonage, which tell us how Charlotte Brontë adored her sisters; and with the modesty of true genius she places herself at their feet, as it were. We have a sketch of Tabitha Aykroyd ironing Aunt Branwell's lace frills and crimping her nightcap borders in _Jane Eyre_, Chapter I., wherein both figure as Bessie and Aunt Reed. Years ago it came to be thought the original of Jane Eyre's Aunt Reed was Miss Branwell, the aunt of the Brontë children, though one writer identified her with a certain Mrs. Sidgwick whose son threw a book at Miss Brontë in her governess days, because "the son of Mrs. Reed" threw a Bible at Jane Eyre. The fact the rainy-day narrations in _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ establish, that Charlotte Brontë associated a "volume-hurling" incident with her childhood and Branwell Brontë's "tyranny," disposed finally of the Sidgwick identifications. John Reed we have now seen was, like Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, drawn by Charlotte Brontë from her brother Branwell Brontë. Always she wrote of him vindictively, and with a retributive justice, her strong characteristic. At about the period when Currer Bell was penning _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ Branwell was a source of considerable distress to her. He was disgraced; his habits were the reverse of temperate, and it was daily feared that in a fit of delirium he might make an attempt upon his own life. Indeed Charlotte Brontë palpably writes of Branwell Brontë and those miserable associations which brought trouble upon Mrs. Gaskell's first edition of the Brontë _Life_, in _The Professor_, Chapter XX., where she says:-- Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of ... domestic treachery.... I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded ... by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle.