The girls took their cold dinner with them, and ate it between the services, in a chamber over the entrance, opening out of the former galleries.

The arrangements for this day were peculiarly trying to delicate children, particularly to those who were spiritless and longing for home, as poor Maria Bronte must have been; for her ill health was increasing, and the old cough, the remains of the hooping-cough, lingered about her.
She was far superior in mind to any of her play-fellows and companions, and was lonely amongst them from that very cause; and yet she had faults so annoying that she was in constant disgrace with her teachers, and an object of merciless dislike to one of them, who is depicted as "Miss Scatcherd" in "Jane Eyre," and whose real name I will be merciful enough not to disclose.

I need hardly say, that Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria Bronte as Charlotte's wonderful power of reproducing character could give.

Her heart, to the latest day on which we met, still beat with unavailing indignation at the worrying and the cruelty to which her gentle, patient, dying sister had been subjected by this woman.
Not a word of that part of "Jane Eyre" but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher.

Those who had been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with which Helen Burns' sufferings are described.