d well understand.

I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge
and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Heger struck me as a
tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up
with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not
understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and
Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart
from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from
Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden
where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her
wonderful, wonderful books.

But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and
ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and
unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and
Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped
before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the
reviews of _Wuthering Heights_; Emily stitching at the long seam with
dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with
Keeper following in the mourners' train.

And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something
mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three
sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and
solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things;
something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that
they called "genius".

Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a
child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Bronte_. And making
some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a
child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this
innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and
preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily
Bronte, solitary and unique.

Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.

_September_ 1911.

APPENDIX I

THE KEY TO THE BRONTE WORKS

More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious
"Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _Saturday
Review_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Bronte Veil", published
in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondence
that fo