Life of Charlotte Brontë | Page 9

not?"
"He's owd, yo seen, and asthmatic, and it's up-hill."
My husband taking a boy for his guide, drove as fast as he could to the
surgeon's house, which was about three-quarters of a mile off, and met
the aunt of the wounded lad leaving it.

"Is he coming?" inquired my husband.
"Well, he didna' say he wouldna' come."
"But, tell him the lad may bleed to death."
"I did."
"And what did he say?"
"Why, only, 'D-n him; what do I care?'"
It ended, however, in his sending one of his sons, who, though not
brought up to "the surgering trade," was able to do what was necessary
in the way of bandages and plasters. The excuse made for the surgeon
was, that "he was near eighty, and getting a bit doited, and had had a
matter o' twenty childer."
Among the most unmoved of the lookers-on was the brother of the boy
so badly hurt; and while he was lying in a pool of blood on the flag
floor, and crying out how much his arm was "warching," his stoical
relation stood coolly smoking his bit of black pipe, and uttered not a
single word of either sympathy or sorrow.
Forest customs, existing in the fringes of dark wood, which clothed the
declivity of the hills on either side, tended to brutalize the population
until the middle of the seventeenth century. Execution by beheading
was performed in a summary way upon either men or women who were
guilty of but very slight crimes; and a dogged, yet in some cases fine,
indifference to human life was thus generated. The roads were so
notoriously bad, even up to the last thirty years, that there was little
communication between one village and another; if the produce of
industry could be conveyed at stated times to the cloth market of the
district, it was all that could be done; and, in lonely houses on the
distant hill-side, or by the small magnates of secluded hamlets, crimes
might be committed almost unknown, certainly without any great
uprising of popular indignation calculated to bring down the strong arm
of the law. It must be remembered that in those days there was no rural
constabulary; and the few magistrates left to themselves, and generally
related to one another, were most of them inclined to tolerate
eccentricity, and to wink at faults too much like their own.
Men hardly past middle life talk of the days of their youth, spent in this
part of the country, when, during the winter months, they rode up to the
saddle-girths in mud; when absolute business was the only reason for
stirring beyond the precincts of home, and when that business was

conducted under a pressure of difficulties which they themselves, borne
along to Bradford market in a swift first-class carriage, can hardly
believe to have been possible. For instance, one woollen manufacturer
says that, not five and twenty years ago, he had to rise betimes to set
off on a winter's- morning in order to be at Bradford with the great
waggon-load of goods manufactured by his father; this load was packed
over-night, but in the morning there was a great gathering around it,
and flashing of lanterns, and examination of horses' feet, before the
ponderous waggon got under way; and then some one had to go
groping here and there, on hands and knees, and always sounding with
a staff down the long, steep, slippery brow, to find where the horses
might tread safely, until they reached the comparative easy-going of the
deep-rutted main road. People went on horseback over the upland
moors, following the tracks of the pack-horses that carried the parcels,
baggage, or goods from one town to another, between which there did
not happen to be a highway.
But in winter, all such communication was impossible, by reason of the
snow which lay long and late on the bleak high ground. I have known
people who, travelling by the mail-coach over Blackstone Edge, had
been snowed up for a week or ten days at the little inn near the summit,
and obliged to spend both Christmas and New Year's Day there, till the
store of provisions laid in for the use of the landlord and his family
falling short before the inroads of the unexpected visitors, they had
recourse to the turkeys, geese, and Yorkshire pies with which the coach
was laden; and even these were beginning to fail, when a fortunate
thaw released them from their prison.
Isolated as the hill villages may be, they are in the world, compared
with the loneliness of the grey ancestral houses to be seen here and
there in the dense hollows of the moors. These dwellings are not large,
yet they are solid and roomy enough for the