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152 Branwell often laid up with violent fits of sickness, Mr. Brontë becoming more utterly blind. At last, in the end of July, Emily and Charlotte set out for Manchester to consult an oculist. There they heard of Mr. Wilson as the best, and to him they went; but only to find that no decisive opinion could be given until their father's eyes had been examined. Yet, not disheartened, they went back to Haworth; for at least they had discovered a physician and had made sure that, even at their father's advanced age, an operation might prove successful. Therefore, at the end of August, Charlotte, who was her father's chief companion and the most easily spared from home, took old Mr. Brontë to Manchester. Mr. Wilson pronounced his eyes ready for the operation, and the old man and his daughter went into lodgings for a month. "I wonder how Emily and Anne will get on at home with Branwell," says Charlotte, accustomed to be the guide and leader of that little household.

Hardly enough, no doubt; for Anne was little fitted now to struggle against fate. She never had completely rallied from the prolonged misery of her sojourn with Branwell in that fatal house which was to blight their future and be blighted by them. She grew weaker and weaker, that "gentle little one," so tender, so ill fitted to her rugged and gloomy path of life. Emily looked on with a breaking heart; trouble encompassed her on every side; her father blind in Manchester; her brother drinking himself to death at home; her sister failing, paling day by day; and every now and then a letter would come announcing that such and such a firm of publishers had no use for 'Agnes Grey' and 'Wuthering Heights.'

Charlotte in Manchester fared little better. 'The Professor' had been returned to her on the very day