had threatened; and on that dreadful night, hearing, as she thought, steps approaching, she snatched up her two infant children, and put them in a basket up the great chimney, common in old-fashioned Yorkshire houses.  One of the two children who had been thus stowed away used to point out with pride, after she had grown up to woman’s estate, the marks of musket shot, and the traces of gunpowder on the walls of her father’s mill.  He was the first that had offered any resistance to the progress of the “Luddites,” who had become by this time so numerous as almost to assume the character of an insurrectionary army.  Mr. Cartwright’s conduct was so much admired by the neighbouring mill-owners that they entered into a subscription for his benefit which amounted in the end to 3,000_l_.

Not much more than a fortnight after this attack on Rawfolds, another manufacturer who employed the obnoxious machinery was shot down in broad daylight, as he was passing over Crossland Moor, which was skirted by a small plantation in which the murderers lay hidden.  The readers of “Shirley” will recognise these circumstances, which were related to Miss Bronte years after they occurred, but on the very spots where they took place, and by persons who remembered full well those terrible times of insecurity to life and property on the one hand, and of bitter starvation and blind ignorant despair on the other.

Mr. Bronte himself had been living amongst these very people in 1812, as he was then clergyman at Hartshead, not three miles from Rawfolds; and, as I have mentioned, it was in these perilous times that he began his custom of carrying a loaded pistol continually about with him.  For not only his Tory politics, but his love and regard for the authority of the law, made him despise the cowardice of the surrounding magistrates, who, in their dread of the Luddites, refused to interfere so as to prevent the destruction of property.  The clergy of the district were the bravest men by far.

There was a Mr. Roberson of Heald’s Hall, a friend of Mr. Bronte’s who has left a deep impression of himself on the public mind.  He lived near Heckmondwike, a large, straggling, dirty village, not two miles from Roe Head.  It was principally inhabited by blanket weavers, who worked in their own cottages; and Heald’s Hall is the largest house in the village, of which Mr. Roberson was the vicar.  At his own cost, he built a handsome church at Liversedge, on a hill opposite the one on which his house stood, which was the first attempt in the West Riding to meet the wants of the overgrown population, and made many personal sacrifices for his opinions, both religious and political, which were of the true old-fashioned Tory stamp.  He hated everything which he fancied had a tendency towards anarchy.  He was loyal in every fibre to Church and King; and would have proudly laid down his life, any day, for what he believed to be right and true.  But he was a man of an imperial will, and by it he