Now, Halford, I bid you adieu for the present. This is the first
instalment of my debt. If the coin suits you, tell me so, and I'll send
you the rest at my leisure: if you would rather remain my creditor than
stuff your purse with such ungainly, heavy pieces,--tell me still, and
I'll pardon your bad taste, and willingly keep the treasure to myself.

Yours immutably,
GILBERT MARKHAM.

CHAPTER II

I perceive, with joy, my most valued friend, that the cloud of your
displeasure has passed away; the light of your countenance blesses me
once more, and you desire the continuation of my story: therefore,
without more ado, you shall have it.

I think the day I last mentioned was a certain Sunday, the latest in the
October of 1827. On the following Tuesday I was out with my dog and gun,
in pursuit of such game as I could find within the territory of
Linden-Car; but finding none at all, I turned my arms against the hawks
and carrion crows, whose depredations, as I suspected, had deprived me of
better prey. To this end I left the more frequented regions, the wooded
valleys, the corn-fields, and the meadow-lands, and proceeded to mount
the steep acclivity of Wildfell, the wildest and the loftiest eminence in
our neighbourhood, where, as you ascend, the hedges, as well as the
trees, become scanty and stunted, the former, at length, giving place to
rough stone fences, partly greened over with ivy and moss, the latter to
larches and Scotch fir-trees, or isolated blackthorns. The fields, being
rough and stony, and wholly unfit for the plough, were mostly devoted to
the posturing of sheep and cattle; the soil was thin and poor: bits of
grey rock here and there peeped out from the grassy hillocks;
bilberry-plants and heather--relics of more savage wildness--grew under
the walls; and in many of the enclosures, ragweeds and rushes usurped
supremacy over the scanty herbage; but these were not my property.

Near the top of this hill, about two miles from Linden-Car, stood
Wildfell Hall, a superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era, built of
dark grey stone, venerable and picturesque to look at, but doubtless,
cold and gloomy enough to inhabit, with its thick stone mullions and
little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-holes, and its too lonely, too
unsheltered situation,--only shielded from the war of wind a