‘Looking at pictures? Aye, that ye are with a vengeance! Do ye see what you’ve done? Daubed your hands with ink, and then rubbed them over every other portrait in the book. Well, child, thou dost try my patience! Take away your fingers this minute. There! he’s drawn a scrawl across Lady Julia Sydney’s bonny face and spoiled the handsomest lass in the book! Leave the room and get me _The Cook’s Guide_: you shall learn a page of recipes for this business before ever you have a morsel of supper. Poor Julia! she’s fairly changed into a blackamoor; and there’s John with an ink mark across his forehead that makes him frown like death. Faith, that was a lucky hit! I’ve a’most a good mind to forgive you for it; but I willn’t either: there’s a hundred pounds thrown away, and I won’t have such work.’ All this was very true. While examining the portraits I had been jotting down the few remarks here contained. The ink had been communicated by the pen to my fingers, and by them to each leaf as I turned it over. If crime can be expiated by punishment, however, my sin was soon washed away. Till ten o’clock that night I was engaged in lifting up my voice over the pathetic pages of _The Cook’s Guide, or, Every Man his own Housekeeper_—(I think that is the title of the abomination); and, let me assure the reader, such a penalty as this might be the guerdon of graver guilt. C. BRONTË, _May 30th_, 1834. MINA LAURY I FROM the first part of the manuscript entitled ‘Passing Events,’ completed by Charlotte Brontë on her twentieth birthday, April 21st, 1836. C. W. H. MINA LAURY I