Wuthering Heights

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 spectres—the air swarmed
with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I
discovered my candle-wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and
perfuming the place with an odour 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 on my knee.
It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a
fly-leaf bore the inscription—“Catherine Earnshaw, her book,” and a
date some quarter of a century back.

I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all.
Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it
to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose:
scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the
appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had
left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a
regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an