branches that at twenty-five he was enabled to enter Cambridge University, upon leaving which, four years later, he was ordained to a curacy in Essex. From Essex he went to Hartshead in Yorkshire, where he married Miss Maria Branwell, a young lady of Cornish parentage. Three years later he removed with his wife and two little baby girls, Maria and Elizabeth, to Thornton in the same county, where four other children were born, one every year. Charlotte, the most famous, was the eldest; she was born in 1816. A son, Patrick Branwell, came next; then Emily Jane; then Anne. In 1820, the year after Anne's birth, the family moved to Haworth Vicarage, in the village of Haworth, near Keighley, in Yorkshire. A year later the mother, always weak and ailing, died, leaving her six young children to their father's care.
Mr. Brontë apparently intended to do his duty to his children; but he was a hard, vain, dull man, fond of solitude, eccentric, and possessed of many strange notions in regard to education. He never cared for his children's society, desired only to have them keep quiet and learn their lessons, allowed them no meat, required them to dine upon potatoes, and ate his own dinner alone in his room. Their dress, too, had to be of the simplest. It was not forgotten in the family that a silk dress of his wife's which displeased him he cut into shreds; nor that some colored shoes given the children by a cousin he threw into the fire.
He possessed a furious temper, which he usually kept under control; but occasionally, when he found it necessary to give some vent to his feelings, he would fire pistols out of the back door in rapid succession. Almost his only communication with the children was at breakfast and supper; his only method of entertaining them was to relate, at the breakfast table, wild and horrible Irish tales of massacre, blood, and banshees. Yet the children loved
