lar diary. I read: "Hindley is detestable. Heathcliff and I are
going to rebel.... How little did I dream Hindley would ever make me cry
so! Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won't let him sit
or eat with us any more."

When I slept I was harrowed by nightmare, and next morning I gladly left
the house; and, piloted by my landlord across the billowy white ocean of
the moor, I reached the Grange benumbed with cold and as feeble as a
kitten from fatigue.

When my housekeeper, Mrs. Nelly Dean, brought in my supper that night I
asked her why Heathcliff let the Grange and preferred living in a
residence so much inferior.

"He's rich enough to live in a finer house than this," said Mrs. Dean;
"but he's very close-handed. Young Mrs. Heathcliff is my late master's
daughter--Catherine Linton was her maiden name, and I nursed her, poor
thing. Hareton Earnshaw is her cousin, and the last of an old family."

"The master, Heathcliff, must have had some ups and downs to make him
such a churl. Do you know anything of his history?"

"It's a cuckoo's, sir. I know all about it, except where he was born,
and who were his parents, and how he got his money. And Hareton Earnshaw
has been cast out like an unfledged dunnock."

I asked Mrs. Dean to bring her sewing, and continue the story. This she
did, evidently pleased to find me companionable.

_II.--The Story Runs Backward_

Before I came to live here (began Mrs. Dean), I was almost always at
Wuthering Heights, because my mother nursed Mr. Hindley Earnshaw, that
was Hareton's father, and I used to run errands and play with the
children. One day, old Mr. Earnshaw, Hareton's grandfather, went to
Liverpool, and promised Hindley and Cathy, his son and daughter, to
bring each of them a present. He was absent three days, and at the end
of that time brought home, bundled up in his arms under his great-coat,
a dirty, ragged, black-haired 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 wo