andlord, though evidently he wished for no repetition of my intrusion.

* * * * *

Yesterday I again visited Wuthering Heights, my nearest neighbours to
Thrushcross Grange. On that bleak hill-top the earth was hard with a
black frost, and the air made me shiver through every limb. As I knocked
for admittance, till my knuckles tingled and the dogs howled, vinegar-
faced Joseph projected his head from a round window of the barn, and
shouted to me.

"What are ye for? T' maister's down i' t' fowld. There's nobbut t'
missis. I'll hae no hend wi't," muttered the head, vanishing.

Then a young man, without coat and shouldering a pitchfork, hailed me to
follow him, and showed me into the apartment where I had been formerly
received with a gruff "Sit down; he'll be in soon."

In the room sat the "missis," motionless and mute. She was slender,
scarcely past girlhood, with the most exquisite little face I have ever
had the pleasure of beholding; and her eyes, had they been agreeable in
expression, would have been irresistible. But the only sentiment they
evinced hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation. As for the
young man who had brought me in, he slung on his person a shabby jacket,
and, erecting himself before the fire, gazed down on me from the corner
of his eyes as if there was some mortal feud unavenged between us. The
entrance of Heathcliff relieved me from an uncomfortable state.

I found in the course of the tea which followed that the lady was the
widow of Heathcliff's son, and that the rustic youth who sat down to the
meal with us was Hareton Earnshaw. Now, before passing the threshold, I
had noticed over the principal door, among a wilderness of crumbling
griffins and shameless little boys, the name "Hareton Earnshaw" and the
date "1500." Evidently the place had a history.

The snow had fallen so deeply since I entered the house that return
across the moor in the dusk was impossible.

Spending that night at Wuthering Heights on an old-fashioned couch that
filled a recess, or closet, in a disused chamber, I found, scratched on
the paint many times, the names "Catherine Earnshaw," "Catherine
Heathcliff," and again "Catherine Linton." There were many books in the
room in a dilapidated state, and, being unable to sleep, I examined
them. Some of them bore the inscription "Catherine Earnshaw, her book";
and on the blank leaves and margins, scrawled in a childish hand, was a
regu