NOTE
It would be quite easy to maintain that these twelve fragments which come to us from the childhood of Charlotte Brontë should not be perpetuated for the public in the printed page. They were written between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, and it was certainly never for a moment contemplated by the author that they would ever see the light. They were handed to me in a little house in Banagher in Ireland, nearly thirty years ago, by the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, the husband of Charlotte Brontë, who in a letter before me explains that they would have been burnt had I not come upon the scene. The ever-increasing fame of Charlotte Brontë in the intervening years has gone on side by side with an immense literature devoted to child psychology. It is as a contribution to that science that I have been frequently exhorted to publish them. A natural indolence would have prevented this had not my friend, Mr. C. W. Hatfield, come to the rescue by diligently transcribing the minute handwriting and preparing the volume with certain useful notes for publication.
CLEMENT SHORTER.
August 1925.