III

ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY

KEIGHLEY, July 19th.

You will wonder, dear Margaret, when you read this letter-heading, where we are and why we are here. I wondered myself, because, as I told you, Walter would give me no satisfaction, having planned this little detour as a surprise to me. Only when looking over some post-cards at a stationer's yesterday afternoon and finding a lot of Haworth pictures-the Brontë house, the Black Bull, and the Church— did it suddenly dawn upon me that Keithley, as these remarkable Britons call it, is the Keighley which Mrs. Gaskell speaks of as an old-fashioned village on the road to Haworth. Walter's delight over my surprise and his success in "doing me," to be quite English, would have amused you and Allan.

This manufacturing town, grimy with the smoke of many worsted mills, is a prosaic enough entrance to the home of the writers of the most romantic and imaginative fiction of

their day. Dull and gray as it looks, after the rich verdure and bloom of Kent and Hampshire, I shall always hold Keighley in grateful remembrance as the gate to a day of perfect happiness in Haworth. This is my real wedding journey, because it was all planned as a surprise for me, and is a pilgrimage so entirely after my own heart.

The Commercial Hotel, which we were told was the least objectionable in the town, is furnished with a grill-room where we dined upon chops of England's best, potatoes browned to a turn, and the inevitable plum tart. After dinner, being interested in refreshing our memories by looking over a copy of Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Brontë," which we picked up in a bookshop, we read until a late hour. The room assigned to us was of magnificent proportions and brilliantly lighted with electricity. The landlady in showing it to me said that it was the manager's room, which I fancy she gave to us as a tribute to my gray hair and generally sedate appearance.

When I turned off the light about midnight I noticed that a number of wires crossed the room near the ceiling, but being very sleepy I paid no attention to them and was soon in the midst of an animated conversation between

Rochester and Charlotte Brontë. The demure little lady was telling her hero, who had long black hair and wore a Lord Byron collar, that he really must leave her then and there, when suddenly upon the stillness of the night there sounded, not the wild shriek of the insane wife of Rochester which would have been entirely appropriate to the occasion and the hour, but a loud, persistent knocking at the door, and a voice calling out something about an old gentleman who had no light and could not find his way to his bed. As this circumstance did not seem especially to concern us, we paid no attention to it until the voice again called out that we had turned off "the central switch," and the whole house was as black as ink.

The old gentleman's dilemma was of so Pickwickian a flavor, and the whole affair was so amusing, especially Walter's wrath over what was quite our own fault, that we forgot our annoyance in the humor of the situation and began the day-for it must then have been after one o'clock-with a hearty laugh.

The next day, the one day we had dedicated to Haworth, it was raining. We are inclined to think that it always rains in Yorkshire, the skies are so leaden. By eleven o'clock, the hour for one of the infrequent trains leaving for

Haworth, the rain had ceased, but the clouds were still heavy and lowering. When, however, we saw the sombre little town quite two miles before we reached the station, upon its hilltop with dun and purple hills rising above it, just as Mrs. Gaskell described it, we concluded that clouds and gray skies best became Haworth. Its associations are certainly not of the gayest, when we remember the semi-tragic life of the three remarkable women who lived here, and their daily and hourly struggle with poverty and ill-health, while across their path was ever the shadow of the ill-doing of the brilliant, beloved, but weak and ill-governed Branwell Brontë.

We were travelling third-class to-day, for local color, and you will, I think, admit that we found it. A portly and red-faced man, still in that debatable land which we are pleased to call middle life, was talking quite earnestly to a companion in a language that we supposed to be Yorkshire, which we managed to understand, even though I am not clever enough to put it on paper. We gathered from the stranger's remarks, interlarded as they were with some quite unfamiliar expletives, that he had not been pleased with his accommodations at the Commercial Hotel at Keighley. Then in quite

plain English he exclaimed, "When I came to the inn at one o'clock, it was all dark, and so, stumbling and batting about, I opened what I thought to be my door. A scream followed, 'Robbers! Fire!' Fortunately I recognized the voice of the manageress, and, quieting her alarm by telling her I had made a mistake, and that the house was as black as a coal-mine, she set about finding out what was the matter."

We were deeply interested by this time, and considerably disconcerted. The speaker's English was evidently a concession to our ignorance, as he was pleased to include us in the conversation.

"And what was it-fuse burned out?" asked the comrade.

"No, some fule of a woman had turned off the central switch. An American-I fancy they don't know much about electricity in that country."

"Where, oh, where did Franklin fly his kite?" murmured Walter.

"The manageress had gone to bed, I fancy, but where was the night watchman?" queried the listener.

"Sound asleep in the office. But did you ever hear of such a fule trick?"

Smothering our laughter, we acknowledged