"The staircase of Brick Court is said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic; women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary2, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable."
This came into my mind when I heard of some of the circumstances attendant on Charlotte's funeral.
Few beyond that circle of hills knew that she, whom the nations praised far off, lay dead that Easter mooring3. Of kith and kin1 she had more in the grave to which she was soon to be borne, than among the living. The two mourners, stunned4 with their great grief, desired not the sympathy of strangers. One member out of most of the families in the parish was bidden to the funeral; and it became an act of self-denial in many a poor household to give up to another the privilege of paying their last homage5 to her; and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged6 the churchyard and church, to see carried forth7, and laid beside her own people, her whom, not many months ago, they had looked at as a pale white bride, entering on a new life with trembling happy hope.
Among those humble8 friends who passionately9 grieved over the dead, was a village girl who had been seduced10 some little time before, but who had found a holy sister in Charlotte. She had sheltered her with her help, her counsel, her strengthening words; had ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter, bitter was the grief of this poor young woman, when she heard that her friend was sick unto death, and deep is her mourning until this day. A blind girl, living some four miles from Haworth, loved Mrs. Nicholls so dearly that, with many cries and entreaties11, she implored12
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