where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet
Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and
Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the
Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop
where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives
that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along
Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of
hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by
blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that
assoil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the
refuse of many mills.

At Keighley our walk begins, and altho we have no peas in our "Pilgrim
shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Bronte who so
often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village
street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the
wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy
houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along
the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its
situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller
in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation
it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was
made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has
made the place illustrious and draws to it visitors from every quarter
of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we
climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating
sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now
one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us
the perfume of the heather.