The scene described does not, however, rest on the authority of Mr. McAllister or his friend, but on the testimony of all who knew the Brontës in their home life. The same scene has been described to me by old men whose memory extended back to matters in the last century, and quite recently, when visiting the place, an aged neighbor pointed out the exact spot where he himself had witnessed the Brontës engaged in their amusements. The story is so characteristic that I give it in extenso, and with all details, as I got it:
“In 1824 I made my first great journey out into the big world, accompanied by my elder brother. I was then very young. The nature of our business obliged us to go on foot, and the distance traversed was two or three miles.
“Our errand brought us into the midst of the Brontës, and as we had to remain there six or seven hours, I had an opportunity of seeing, under various aspects, that extraordinary and unique family, whose genius came to be revealed a few years later by three little girls, on English soil.
“I first saw a group of the Brontë brothers together. I think there were six of them, and they were marching, in step, across a field towards a level road. Their style of marching, and whole appearance, arrested my attention. They were dressed alike, in home-spun and home-knitted garments, that fitted them closely, and showed off to perfection their large, lithe, and muscular forms. They were all over six feet high, but, with their close-fitting apparel and erect bearing, they appeared to me to be men of gigantic stature. They bounded lightly over all the fences that stood in their way, all springing from the ground and alighting together, and they continued to march in step without an apparent effort, until they reached the public road, and then they began, in a business-like way, to settle conditions, in preparation for a serious contest.
“A few men and boys watched the little group of Brontës timorously, from a distance, but curiosity drew my brother and myself close up to where they were assembled. They did not seem to notice us, or know that we were present, but proceeded with a match of rolling a large metal ball along the road. The ball seemed to be about six pounds weight, and the one who could make it roll furthest along the road would be declared the winner.
“The contest was to them an earnest business. Every ounce of elastic force in the great, muscular frames was called into action, and there was a profusion of strange, strong language that literally made my flesh to creep, and my hair to stand on end. The forms of expression which they used were as far from commonplace as anything ever written by the gifted nieces; and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower plane of civilization, and their scant education had not reduced their tongues to the conventional forms of speech, they gave utterance to their thoughts with a pent-up and concentrated energy never equalled in rugged force by the novelists.
“I had never seen men like the Brontës, and I had never heard language like theirs. The quaint conceptions and glowing thoughts and ferocious epithets that struggled for utterance, at the unlettered lips of the Irish Brontës, revealed the original quarry from which the vicar’s daughters chiselled the stones for their artistic castle-building, and disclosed the original fountain from which they drew their pathos and passion. Similar fierce originality and power are felt to be present in everything produced by the English Brontës, but in their case the intensity of energy is held in check by the Branwell temperament, and kept under restraint by education and culture.
“The match over, and the sweep-stakes secured, the brothers returned to their harvest labor as they went, clearing, like greyhounds, every fence that stood in their way. At that time no fame attached to the Brontë name, but the men that I had come upon were so different from the local gentry, farmers, flax-dressers, and such like people, who lived around them, that I became, all at once, deeply interested in them.
“From a distance I watched their shining sickles flashing among the golden grain, and caught snatches of song, which I afterwards found to be from Robert Burns. My interest, however, in the Brontës was shared by no one. They were then neither prophets nor heroes in their own country, and they were regarded with a kind of superstitious dread by their neighbors, rather than with interest or curiosity.
“Young as I then was, I persevered with my inquiries, and my curiosity was rewarded. I learned that the Brontës had a brother a clergyman in England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a visit with them, and that the Brontë family were in the habit of holding an open-air concert every favorable afternoon in a secluded glen below their house. I remember wondering if the clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous vernacular of his kith and kin, but I was especially interested in the open-air concert.