pick out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling Charlotte’s.  Emily Bronte does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows.  If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother’s ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression.  Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer’s day.”

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were before.  You see them, if anything, more poignantly.  You see their cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness only makes it blacker.

        Nessun maggior dolore
  Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
  Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte’s.

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with his little pictures, Pictures of the Past, presenting a dreadfully unattractive Charlotte.

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the poor boy.  He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt like praying with her too, but he was not “good enough”, how he came away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings.  “Charlotte observed my depression,” Branwell said, “and asked what ailed me.  So I told her.  She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred years old—­which I never shall.  It was not like her at all.  It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in the mouth.  It involved ever so many things in it.  It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast.  It said, ’Did my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?’ And then came the painful, baffled expression, which was worse than all.  It said, ’I wonder if that’s true?’ But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, ’She is my little scholar, and I will go and see her.’  I replied not a word.  I was too much cut up!  When she was gone, I came over here to the ‘Black Bull’ and made a note of it....”