“Who mells wi’ what another does
   Had best go home and shoe his goose.”

I asked an inhabitant of a district close to Haworth what sort of a clergyman they had at the church which he attended.

“A rare good one,” said he:  “he minds his own business, and ne’er troubles himself with ours.”

Mr. Bronte was faithful in visiting the sick and all those who sent for him, and diligent in attendance at the schools; and so was his daughter Charlotte too; but, cherishing and valuing privacy themselves, they were perhaps over-delicate in not intruding upon the privacy of others.

From their first going to Haworth, their walks were directed rather out towards the heathery moors, sloping upwards behind the parsonage, than towards the long descending village street.  A good old woman, who came to nurse Mrs. Bronte in the illness—­an internal cancer—­which grew and gathered upon her, not many months after her arrival at Haworth, tells me that at that time the six little creatures used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things.

They were grave and silent beyond their years; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house; for, at the time which my informant speaks of, Mrs. Bronte was confined to the bedroom from which she never came forth alive.  “You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures.  Maria would shut herself up” (Maria, but seven!) “in the children’s study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one everything when she came out; debates in Parliament, and I don’t know what all.  She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother.  But there never were such good children.  I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen.  They were good little creatures.  Emily was the prettiest.”

Mrs. Bronte was the same patient, cheerful person as we have seen her formerly; very ill, suffering great pain, but seldom if ever complaining; at her better times begging her nurse to raise her in bed to let her see her clean the grate, “because she did it as it was done in Cornwall;” devotedly fond of her husband, who warmly repaid her affection, and suffered no one else to take the night-nursing; but, according to my informant, the mother was not very anxious to see much of her children, probably because the sight of them, knowing how soon they were to be left motherless, would have agitated her too much.  So the little things clung quietly together, for their father was busy in his study and in his parish, or with their mother, and they took their meals alone; sat reading, or whispering low, in the “children’s study,” or wandered out on the hill-side, hand in hand.