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THE   BRONTES                      37
is going on round them at the moment. (This
childish habit persists in Emily's and Anne's later
chronicles.) "While I write this," Charlotte
writes (March isth, 1829), " I am in the kitchen
of the Parsonage, Haworth. Tabby, the servant,
is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my
youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling
on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby
has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlour,
brushing the carpet. Papa and Branwell are
gone to Keighley. Aunt is upstairs in her room
and I am sitting by the table writing in the
kitchen." Having dealt with immediate sur-
roundings, Charlotte perhaps bit her pen and
looked further afield. " Keighley," she goes on,
" is a small town four miles from here. Papa and
Branwell are gone for the newspaper, the Leeds
Intelligencer, a most excellent Tory newspaper,
edited by Mr. Wood and the proprietor, Mr.
Henneman. We take two and see three news-
.papers a week. We take the Leeds Intelligencer,
Tory, and the Leeds Mercury, Whig, edited by Mr.
Baines and his brother, son-in-law and two sons,
Edward and Talbot. We see the John Bull; it
is a high Tory, very violent. Dr. Driver lends us
it, as likewise Blackwood*s Magazine, the most able
periodical there is. The editor is Mr. Christopher
North, an old man, seventy-four years of age : the
ist of April is his birthday : his company are
Timothy Tickler, Morgan O'Doherty, Macrabin
Mordecai, Mullion, Warnell and James Hogg, a
man of most extraordinary genius, a Scottish
shepherd." She then plunges into more important