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{56a} The house in which Patrick Bronte resided is
now a butcher's shop, and indeed little, one imagines, remains the same.
But within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find,
with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the Bronte children.
There, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the
neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries, {56b} differing from
their neighbours only by the fact that Mr. Morgan or Mr. Fennell came to
the help of their relatives and officiated in place of Mr. Bronte. Mr.
Bronte, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to
Haworth when Anne was baptized.
There were, it is well known, two elder children, Maria and Elizabeth,
born at Hartshead, and doomed to die speedily at Haworth. A vague memory
of Maria lives in the Helen Burns of _Jane Eyre_, but the only tangible
records of the pair, as far as I am able to ascertain, are a couple of
samplers, of the kind which Mrs. Bronte and her sisters had worked at
Penzance a generation earlier.
_Maria Bronte finished this Sampler on the 16th of May at the age of
eight years_
one of them tells us, and the other:
_Elizabeth Bronte finished this Sampler the 27th of July at the age
of seven years_.
Maria died at the age of twelve in May 1825, and Elizabeth in June of the
same year, at the age of eleven.


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