child, big enough both to walk and talk, but only able to talk gibberish nobody could understand.  He had picked it up, he said, starving and homeless in the streets of Liverpool.  Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors, but Mr. Earnshaw told her to wash it, give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.  The children’s presents were forgotten.  This was how Heathcliff, as they called him, came to Wuthering Heights.

Miss Cathy and he soon became very thick; but Hindley hated him.  He was a patient, sullen child, who would stand blows without winking or shedding a tear.  From the beginning he bred bad feeling in the house.  Old Earnshaw took to him strangely, and Hindley regarded him as having usurped his father’s affections.  As for Heathcliff, he was insensible to kindness.  Cathy, a wild slip, with the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish, was much too fond of Heathcliff.

Old Mr. Earnshaw died quietly in his chair by the fireside one October evening.

Mr. Hindley, who had been to college, came home to the funeral, and set the neighbours gossiping right and left, for he brought a wife with him.  What she was and where she was born he never informed us.  She evinced a dislike to Heathcliff, and drove him to the company of the servants, but Cathy clung to him, and the two promised to grow up together as rude as savages.  Once Hindley shut them out for the night and they came to Thrushcross Grange, where the Lintons took Cathy in, but would not have anything to do with Heathcliff, the Spanish castaway, as they called him.  She stayed five weeks with the Lintons, and became very friendly with the children, Edgar and Isabella, and when she came back was a dignified little person, and quite a beauty.

Soon after, Hindley’s son, Hareton, was born, the mother died, and the child fell wholly into my hands, for the father grew desperate in his sorrow, and gave himself up to reckless dissipation.  His treatment of Heathcliff now was enough to make a fiend of a saint, and daily the lad became more savagely sullen.  I could not half-tell what an infernal house we had, till at last nobody decent came near us, except that Edgar Linton called to see Cathy, who at fifteen was the queen of the countryside—­a haughty and headstrong creature.

One day after Edgar Linton had been over from the Grange, Cathy came into the kitchen to me and said, “Nelly, will you keep a secret for me?  To-day Edgar Linton has asked me to marry him, and I’ve given him an answer.  I accepted him, Nelly.  Be quick and say whether I was wrong.”

“First and foremost,” I said sententiously, “do you love Mr. Edgar?”

“I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says.  I love his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely and altogether.  There now!”

“Then,” said I, “all seems smooth and easy.  Where is the obstacle?”