I plied the knocker at the parsonage door and asked for the rector.  He was away at Kendal to attend a funeral, but his wife was at home—­a pleasant, matronly woman of near sixty, with smooth, white hair.  She came to the door knitting furiously, but from her regulation smile I saw that visitors were not uncommon.

“You want to see the home of the Brontes?  That’s right, come right in.  This was the study of the Reverend Patrick Bronte, Incumbent of this Parish for fifty years.”

She sang her little song and knitted and shifted the needles and measured the foot, for the stocking was nearly done.  It was a blue stocking (although she wasn’t) with a white toe; and all the time she led me from room to room telling me about the Brontes—­how there were the father, mother and six children.  They all came together.  The mother died shortly, and then two of the little girls died.  That left three girls and Branwell the boy.  He was petted and made too much of by his father and everybody.  He was the one that always was going to do great things.  He made the girls wait on him and cuffed them if they didn’t, and if they did, and all the time told of the things he was going to do.  But he never did them, for he spent most of his time at the taverns.  After a while he died—­died of the tremens.

The three Bronte girls, Emily, Charlotte and Annie, wrote a novel apiece, and never showed them to their father or to any one.  They called ’emselves Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and their novels were the greatest ever written—­they wrote them ’emselves with no man to help.  Their father was awful mad about it, but when the money began to come in he felt better.  Emily died when she was twenty-seven.  She was the brightest of them all; then Annie died, and only Charlotte and the old man were left.  Charlotte married her father’s curate, but old Mr. Bronte wouldn’t go to the wedding:  he went to the Black Bull instead.  Miss Wooler gave the bride away—­some one had to give her away, you know.  The bride was thirty-eight.  She died in less them a year, and old Mr. Bronte and Charlotte’s husband lived here alone together.

This was Charlotte’s room; this is the desk where she wrote “Jane Eyre”—­leastwise they say it is.  This is the chair she sat in, and under that framed glass are several sheets of her manuscript.  The writing is almost too small to read; and so fine and yet so perfect and neat!  She was a wonderful tidy body, very small and delicate and gentle, yet with a good deal of her father’s energy.

Here are letters she wrote:  you can look at them if you choose.  This footstool she made and covered herself.  It is filled with heather-blossoms—­just as she left it.  Those books were hers, too—­many of them given to her by great authors.  See, there is Thackeray’s name written by himself, and a letter from him pasted inside the front cover.  He was a big man they say, but he wrote very small, and Charlotte wrote just like him, only better, and now there are hundreds of folks write like ’em both.  Then here’s a book with Miss Martineau’s name, and another from Robert Browning—­do you know who he was?