And now I will tell you what has made me take up Jane Eyre again at this time. I was bicycling a day or two ago in a secluded valley under the purple heights of Ingleboro'. I passed a little village, with a big building standing by a stream below the road, called Lowood. It came into my head as a pleasant thought that some place like this might have been the scene of the schooldays of Jane Eyre; but I thought no more of it, till a little while after I saw a tablet in the wall of a house by the wayside. I dismounted, and behold! it was the very place, the very building where Charlotte Bronte spent her schooldays. It was a low, humble building, now divided into cottages. But you can still see the windows of the dormitory, the little kitchen garden, the brawling stream, the path across the meadows, and, beyond all, the long line of the moor. In a house just opposite was a portrait of Mr. Brocklehurst himself (his real name was Carus-Wilson), so sternly, and I expect unjustly, gibbetted in the book. That was a very sacred hour for me. I thought of Miss Temple and Helen Burns; I thought of the cold, the privation, the rigour of that comfortless place. But I felt that it was good to be there. I drew nearer in that hour to the unquenched spirit that battled so gloriously with life and with its worst terrors and sorrows, and that wrote so firmly and truly its pure hopes and immortal dreams. . . .--Ever yours, T. B. ASHFIELD, SETTLE, Aug. 27, 1904. DEAR HERBERT,--You ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put me in a difficulty. It seems hardly worth while sending out books which will just be read once or twice in a lazy mood and then thrown aside; yet I can find no others. It seems to me that our novelists are at the present moment affected by the same wave which seems to be passing over the whole of our national life; we have in every department a large number of almost first-rate people, men of talent and ability; but very few geniuses, very few people of undisputed pre-eminence. In literature this is particularly the case; poets, historians, essayists, dramatists, novelists; there are so many that reach a high level of accomplishment, and do excellent work; but there are no giants, or they are very small ones. Personally, I do not read a great many novels; and I find myself tending to revert again and again to my old favourites.