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setting these wild flights of fantasy—a delirium, even— down on paper. Even if the account you produced had in fact been intended as fiction, no reader would have suspended their disbelief in your crazy tale. If you wish to concoct a story, dear nephew, may I suggest you open a volume—by Sir Walter Scott or another—and learn your craft. Leading a reader to believe what you put down is altogether a more difficult business than you give credence for.
    So please understand that I can go as far as the door of the ‘upstairs study’ you describe, with you; and no further.
    You state that you found the bleak small room to which the housekeeper conducted you most unwelcoming (this I can believe if the room was, as I imagine it to have been, the bedchamber of the late author whose manuscript you have not rendered to me).
    You go on to remark that ‘as soon as the door was closed, the terrible cold tomb-wind entered through the window; the lamp blew out; and what appeared to be a hand knocked at the lattice’.
    How can this be, dear Henry? On a freezing night, a hand at the window of an upper floor? Your contention that there were repeated attempts by this ‘hand’ to open the lattice leaves me completely unconvinced. The bare bough of a tree, my boy, no more. And the fact you ‘nearly died of fear’ appears little other than the ridiculous exaggeration of a drunkard. I shall not write to your father directly on the subject of your visit to Haworth, but I shall consider doing so if this ineffective and unmanly behaviour is seen to continue.
    It is unpleasing in the extreme for me to have to refer to your next contention, in what is throughout a preposterous letter. You say that ‘heart beating wildly’—please dear nephew, a Newby, a relative of a publisher accustomed to dealing with the most refined and discriminating of authors, should not deal so freely in cliché—you say you ‘groped your way towards a narrow truckle bed and as if drugged fell into a heavy sleep’. (I make no comment here: I do not trade in the obvious.) Then, in your own unappealing terminology, ‘worse was to come’. I hesitate to repeat to you the unsavoury assertions which follow, here: only the hope that the perusal of your own words may give you pause for thought, leads me to believe that you may learn to improve your ways, and this sooner rather than at a later date.
    I shall go on, for this reason alone. ‘I woke when the church clock, as I assumed it must be, began to chime’, you write, ‘and as I counted to midnight I realised I was awake and seeing in the New Year in the most ghastly and intolerable way ever devised—if devised it was. For surely, what now took place was the work of an evil prankster; one who knew I lacked light in that dreadful little cell of a room and thus could assume any shape, in my fearful imagination, that it pleased?
    â€˜Uncle’—you continued, praying I daresay for my belief in this nonsense and thus for a reprieve from my inevitable wrath at the incompetence you have shown—‘Uncle, the dank creature which now lay beside me on that narrow bed was more horrible by far than the hand at the window—more shattering to the heart and soul than any monster dreamed by a child. For what lay beside me was a woman— not long dead as I soon saw when the moon looked in through the lattice with a harsh light—a womanwho clung to me with the piteous desperation of one who dreads a certain return to the tomb. She asked me to save her: I swear she did; but my arms were as heavy as lead; and she died a second time beside me there, her skin giving out a chill impossible either to forget or to describe.
    â€˜I have had horrors, Uncle, pray forgive and understand me in my hour of need.
    â€˜I lay all the remainder of the night while the moon played catch-as-catch-can with the black clouds that trailed the night