clear impression of how the house appeared to those who lived brighter lives: ‘Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own “Jane Eyre.” She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her, barring that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was first built; and yet, perhaps, when that old man married, and took home his bride, and children’s voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate crowded graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope.’ Very soon after the family came to Haworth Mrs. Brontë died, when the eldest girl, Maria, was only six years old; and far from there having been any childish laughter about the house, we are told that the children were unusually solemn from their infancy. In their earliest walks, the five little girls with their one brother--all of them under seven years--directed their steps towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Eighty-eight years have passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled back over the intervening years. The unnatural environment of the Brontës’ childhood gave that lurid colour to their imaginations so evident in the writings of Charlotte and Emily, and, when at Roe Head School, one of Charlotte’s friends, after describing in a letter her companion’s strange gift of ‘making out’ histories and inventing characters, writes: ‘I told her sometimes they were like growing potatoes in a cellar. She said sadly, “Yes, I know we are.”’ It is difficult to quite absolve the father of this remarkable family for not realizing that his little girls were not living a healthy childhood, mentally or physically, and all we read of Mr. Brontë in Mrs. Gaskell’s book suggests a total want of appreciation of the important elements so woefully lacking in their upbringing. In those days Haworth was extremely isolated, and the few outside influences that reached the neighbourhood came no nearer than the small manufacturing town of Keighley, four miles away. The journey to London was then a vast undertaking, whereas now we can reach the famous old ‘parsonage’ from St. Pancras, by the Midland Railway, in less than four hours. The purple moors so beloved by the Brontës stretch away to the Calder Valley, and beyond that depression in great sweeping outlines to the Peak of Derbyshire, where they exceed 2,000 feet in [Illustration: SHEFFIELD AT NIGHT The picture was made at Brightside, where the great foundries produce armour-plate, cannon, and steel rails. The cherry-coloured flames that crown the shafts are a wonderful sight.]