h
talking of conversations by the fireside. Depend upon it, we are not
to have any such for many a long month to come. I get an interesting
impression of old age upon my face, and when you see me next I shall
certainly wear caps and spectacles.--Yours affectionately,

'C. B.'

This Mr. Jenkins was chaplain to the British Embassy at Brussels, and not
Consul, as Charlotte at first supposed. The brother of his wife was a
clergyman living in the neighbourhood of Haworth. Mr. Jenkins, whose
English Episcopal chapel Charlotte attended during her stay in Brussels,
finally recommended the Pensionnat Heger in the Rue d'Isabelle. Madame
Heger wrote, accepting the two girls as pupils, and to Brussels their
father escorted them in February 1842, staying one night at the house of
Mr. Jenkins and then returning to Haworth.

The life of Charlotte Bronte at Brussels has been mirrored for us with
absolute accuracy in _Villette_ and _The Professor_. That, indeed, from
the point of view of local colour, is made sufficiently plain to the
casual visitor of to-day who calls in the Rue d'Isabelle. The house, it
is true, is dismantled with a view to its incorporation into some city
buildings in the background, but one may still eat pears from the 'old
and huge fruit-trees' which flourished when Charlotte and Emily walked
under them half a century ago; one may still wander through the
school-rooms, the long dormitories, and into the 'vine-draped
_berceau_'--little enough is changed within and without. Here is the
dormitory with its twenty beds, the two end ones being occupied by Emily
and Charlotte, they alone securing the privilege of age or English
eccentricity to curtain off their beds from the gaze of the eighteen
girls who shared the room with them. The crucifix, indeed, has been
removed from the niche in the _Oratoire_ where the children offered up
prayer every morning; but with a copy of _Villette_ in hand it is
possible to restore every feature of the place, not excluding the
adjoining Athenee with its small window overlooking the garden of the
Pensionnat and the _allee defendu_. It was from this window that Mr.
Crimsworth of _The Professor_ looked down upon the girls at play. It was
here, indeed, at the Royal Athenee, that M. Heger was Professor of Latin.
Externally, then, the Pensionnat Heger remains practically the same as it
appeared to C