looking in features, and stout and
healthy, but attired in garments befitting his daily occupations of working on
the farm, and lounging among the moors after rabbits and game. Still, I thought
I could detect in his physiognomy a mind owning better qualities than his father
ever possessed. Good things lost amid a wilderness of weeds, to be sure, whose
rankness far over-topped their neglected growth; yet notwithstanding, evidence
of a wealthy soil that might yield luxuriant crops, under other and favourable
circumstances. Mr. Heathcliff, I believe, had not treated him physically ill;
thanks to his fearless nature which offered no temptation to that course of
oppression; it had none of the timid susceptibility that would have given zest
to ill-treatment, in Heathcliff's judgment. He appeared to have bent his
malevolence on making him a brute: he was never taught to read or write; never
rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single
step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice. And from what
I heard, Joseph contributed much to his deterioration by a narrow minded
partiality which prompted him to flatter, and pet him, as a boy, because he was
the head of the old family. And as he had been in the habit of accusing
Catherine Earnshaw, and Heathcliff, when children, of putting the master past
his patience, and compelling him to seek solace in drink, by what he termed,
their offalld ways, so at present, he laid the whole burden of Hareton's faults
on the shoulders of the usurper of his property.
    If the lad swore he wouldn't correct him; nor however culpably he behaved.
It gave Joseph satisfaction, apparently, to watch him go the worst lengths. He
allowed that he was ruined; that his soul was abandoned to perdition; but then,
he reflected that Heathcliff must answer for it. Hareton's blood would be
required at his hands; and there lay immense consolation in that thought.
    Joseph had instilled into him a pride of name, and of his lineage; he would
had he dared, have fostered hate between him and the present owner of the
Heights, but his dread of that owner amounted to superstition; and he confined
his feelings, regarding him, to muttered inuendos and private comminations.
    I don't pretend to be intimately acquainted with the mode of living
customary in those days, at Wuthering Heights. I only speak from hearsay; for I
saw little. The villagers affirmed Mr. Heathcliff was near, and a cruel hard
landlord to his