after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily
Bronte's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred
at the inn door.

The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is
scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the
villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb;
in the time of the Brontes the village women dried their linen on these
graves. Close to the wall which divides the churchyard from the vicarage
is a plain stone set by Charlotte Bronte to mark the grave of Tabby, the
faithful servant who served the Brontes from their childhood till all
but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark
from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been
remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments
have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Bronte was
laid there. The site of the Bronte pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat
in the farther corner, Anne next and Charlotte by the door, within a
foot of the spot where her ashes now lie.

A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau
sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her
sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to
the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for
Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record,
its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's at the
age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained
window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Bronte, by
an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from
America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here
almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn