le Brontes,
whose thin blood flowed languidly in consequence of their feeble
appetites rejecting the food prepared for them, and thus inducing a half-
starved condition. The church was not warmed, there being no means for
this purpose. It stands in the midst of fields, and the damp mist must
have gathered round the walls, and crept in at the windows. The girls
took their cold dinner with them, and ate it between the services, in a
chamber over the entrance, opening out of the former galleries. The
arrangements for this day were peculiarly trying to delicate children,
particularly to those who were spiritless and longing for home, as poor
Maria Bronte must have been; for her ill health was increasing, and the
old cough, the remains of the hooping-cough, lingered about her.

She was far superior in mind to any of her play-fellows and companions,
and was lonely amongst them from that very cause; and yet she had faults
so annoying that she was in constant disgrace with her teachers, and an
object of merciless dislike to one of them, who is depicted as "Miss
Scatcherd" in "Jane Eyre," and whose real name I will be merciful enough
not to disclose. I need hardly say, that Helen Burns is as exact a
transcript of Maria Bronte as Charlotte's wonderful power of reproducing
character could give. Her heart, to the latest day on which we met,
still beat with unavailing indignation at the worrying and the cruelty to
which her gentle, patient, dying sister had been subjected by this woman.
Not a word of that part of "Jane Eyre" but is a literal repetition of
scenes between the pupil and the teacher. Those who had been pupils at
the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with
which Helen Burns' sufferings are described. They had, before that,
recognised the description of the sweet dignity and benevolence of Miss
Temple as only a just tribute to the merits of one whom all that knew her
appear to hold in honour; but when Miss Scatcherd was held up to
opprobrium they also recognised in the writer of "Jane Eyre" an
unconsciously avenging sister of the sufferer.

One of their fellow-pupils, among other statements even worse, gives me
the following:--The dormitory in which Maria slept was a long room,
holding a row of narrow little beds on each side, occupied by the pupils;
and at the end of this dormitory there was a small bed-chamber opening
out of it, appropriated to the use of Miss Scatcherd. Maria's bed st