Chapter 1
　　I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
　　The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.
　　The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
　　So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
　　Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela 《帕米拉》，作者为英国小说家理查逊（Samuel Richardson 1689 — 1761), and Henry, Earl of Moreland 《莫兰伯爵亨利》韦斯利 (John Weslev）根据爱尔兰小说家和剧作家布鲁克（Henry Brooke）的小说《显赫的傻瓜》(the Fool of Quality）删节而成的一部畅销书，首次出版于 1781 年.
　　With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room door opened.
　　"Boh! Madam Mope 忧郁的小姐(John Reed 对 Jane Eyre 的蔑称)!" cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
　　"Where the dickens is she!" he continued. "Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain — bad animal!"
　　"It is well I drew the curtain, " thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding - place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once —
　　"She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack."
　　And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.
　　"What do you want?" I asked, with awkward diffidence.
　　"Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" was the answer. "I want you to come here;" and seating himself in an armchair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.