their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small
and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood
about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth,
of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria
and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has
been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron,
the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early
Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under
affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal
nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive
drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson,
indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the
perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the
flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one
after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were
laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another
destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room
at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then
Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a
while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it,
and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited
for Charlotte and for Emily.

There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was