CHAPTER III.
While leading the way up-stairs, she recommended that I should hide the candle and not make a noise, for her master had an odd notion about the chamber she would put me in, and never let any body lodge there willingly.
I asked the reason.
She did not know, she answered; she had lived there only a year or two, and they had so many queer goings on she could not begin to be curious.
Too stupefied to be curious myself, I fastened my door and glanced round for the bed. The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top, resembling coach windows.
Having approached this structure, I looked inside, and perceived it to be a singular sort of old-fashioned couch, very conveniently designed to obviate the necessity for every member of the family having a room to himself. In fact, it formed a little closet; and the ledge of a window, which it inclosed, served as a table.
I slid back the panneled sides, got in with my light, pulled them together again, and felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff and every one else.
The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner, and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.
In vapid listlessness I leaned my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as specters—the air swarmed with Catherines; and, rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candlewick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odor of roasted calf-skin.
I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome
