vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that
came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the
parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was
Bronte's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with
their books propt on the table before them while they worked, and where
Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane,
took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the
wound, telling no one till danger was past.

Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the
scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above
Bronte's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later
Branwell's apartment and the theater of the most terrible tragedies of
the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of
mania-a-potu; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from
his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out
his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with
love-letters from the perfidious woman who brought his ruin. Even now
the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and
wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make
it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontes' time it must have been cheerless
indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its
fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely
admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been
closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom
"Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.

By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the
Brontes daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates
lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises