committee—­the school assumes a sound English character—­ Jane progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable and not unhappy years at Lowood.  Then she advertises for a situation as governess, and obtains one immediately in one of the midland counties.  We see her, therefore, as she leaves Lowood, to enter upon a new life—­a small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is now thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.

Thornfield Hall is the property of Mr. Rochester—­a bachelor addicted to travelling.  She finds it at first in all the peaceful prestige of an English gentleman’s seat when “nobody is at the hall.”  The companions are an old decayed gentlewoman housekeeper—­a far away cousin of the squire’s—­and a young French child, Jane’s pupil, Mr. Rochester’s ward and reputed daughter.  There is a pleasing monotony in the summer solitude of the old country house, with its comfort, respectability, and dulness, which Jane paints to the life; but there is one circumstance which varies the sameness and casts a mysterious feeling over the scene.  A strange laugh is heard from time to time in a distant part of the house—­a laugh which grates discordantly upon Jane’s ear.  She listens, watches, and inquires, but can discover nothing but a plain matter of fact woman, who sits sewing somewhere in the attics, and goes up and down stairs peaceably to and from her dinner with the servants.  But a mystery there is, though nothing betrays it, and it comes in with marvellous effect from the monotonous reality of all around.  After awhile Mr. Rochester comes to Thornfield, and sends for the child and her governess occasionally to bear him company.  He is a dark, strange-looking man—­strong and large—­of the brigand stamp, with fine eyes and lowering brows—­blunt and sarcastic in his manners, with a kind of misanthropical frankness, which seems based upon utter contempt for his fellow-creatures and a surly truthfulness which is more rudeness than honesty.  With his arrival disappears all the prestige of country innocence that had invested Thornfield Hall.  He brings the taint of the world upon him, and none of its illusions.  The queer little governess is something new to him.  He talks to her at one time imperiously as to a servant, and at another recklessly as to a man.  He pours into her ears disgraceful tales of his past life, connected with the birth of little Adele, which any man with common respect for a woman, and that a mere girl of eighteen, would have spared her; but which eighteen in this case listens to as if it were nothing new, and certainly nothing distasteful.  He is captious and Turk-like—­she is one day his confidant, and another his unnoticed dependant.  In short, by her account, Mr. Rochester is a strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western