him, and rendered him an obedience and devotion which much kinder and wiser parents can not always obtain.
Thus the six little Brontës, motherless, and denied the intimacy and companionship of their father, clung to each other with a love far beyond that of most brothers and sisters of their age. They were wonderfully "good," poor little things, the boy being the only one who showed any evidences of vigor.
They spent much of their time wandering silently about the old house and the bleak moors beyond it, hand in hand, Maria, the eldest, a pale, small creature of seven, assuming the charge of the others, and trying her best to be a mother to them. Their surroundings were sombre and dreary. Haworth Parsonage stands upon a hill which slopes sharply down to the village in one direction, and in the other, after a slight further ascent, merges into an apparently interminable expanse of moorland. The church and school-house stand close by, while above the house, and surrounding it upon three sides, lies the graveyard, crowded with upright tombstones. The parsonage itself is a low stone building, ancient, draughty, and picturesque, with heavy, flagged roof made to resist the winds that sweep across the moor, with chilly flagged floors, old-fashioned windows with small, glittering panes, and a few hardy flowers, some elder and lilac bushes, growing beneath shelter of its walls.
The sounds with which the children were most familiar were the rushing and moaning of the wind around the chimneys, the bell of the church, ringing to service or tolling for funerals, and, whenever the house was still, the constant chip! chip! of the stone-mason who lived near the gate, cutting an epitaph upon one of the slates which he kept piled in his shed. The sights they loved were the firelight and the broad moor. Games, like those of ordinary children, they never played. The elder chil-
