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CHAPTER VI.
GIRLHOOD AT HAWORTH.
The next two years passed very solitarily for Emily at Haworth; the Brontës were too poor for all to stay at home, and since it was definitely settled that Emily could not live away, she worked hard at home while her sisters went out in the world to gain their bread. She had no friend besides her sisters; far-off Anne was her only confidant. Outside her own circle the only person that she cared to meet was Charlotte's friend Ellen, and, of course, Ellen did not come to Haworth while Charlotte was away. Branwell, too, was absent. His first engagement was as usher in a school; but, mortified by the boys' sarcasms on his red hair and "downcast smallness," he speedily threw up his situation and returned to Haworth to confide his wounded vanity to the tender mercies of the rough and valiant Emily, or to loaf about the village seeking readier consolation.
Then he went as private tutor to a family in Broughton-in-Furness. One letter of his thence despatched to some congenial spirit in Haworth, long since dead, has been lent to me by the courtesy of Mr. William Wood, one of the last of Branwell's companions, in whose possession the torn, faded sheet remains. Much of it is unreadable from accidental rents and the purposed excision of private passages, and part of that which can be read cannot be quoted; such as it is, the letter is
