Mr. Bronte's few and brief visits to town, during his residence
at Cambridge, and the period of his curacy in Essex, he had
stayed at this house; hither he had brought his daughters, when
he was convoying them to Brussels; and here they came now, from
very ignorance where else to go. It was a place solely frequented
by men; I believe there was but one female servant in the house.
Few people slept there; some of the stated meetings of the Trade
were held in it, as they had been for more than a century; and,
occasionally country booksellers, with now and then a clergyman,
resorted to it; but it was a strange desolate place for the Miss
Brontes to have gone to, from its purely business and masculine
aspect. The old "grey-haired elderly man," who officiated as
waiter seems to have been touched from the very first with the
quiet simplicity of the two ladies, and he tried to make them
feel comfortable and at home in the long, low, dingy room
up-stairs, where the meetings of the Trade were held. The high
narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row; the sisters, clinging
together on the most remote window-seat, (as Mr. Smith tells me
he found them, when he came, that Saturday evening, to take them
to the Opera,) could see nothing of motion, or of change, in the
grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close, although the whole
breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was
round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every footfall
on the pavement below might be heard distinctly, in that
unfrequented street. Such as it was, they preferred remaining at
the Chapter Coffee-house, to accepting the invitation which Mr.
Smith and his mother urged upon them, and, in after years,
Charlotte says:--

"Since those days, I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine