"The dirty, ragged, black-haired child," brought home by Mr. Earnshaw from Liverpool, is none other than the real dirty, naked, black-haired foundling, discovered on the boat between Liverpool and Drogheda, and taken home by Charlotte's great-grandfather and great-grandmother to the banks of the Boyne. The artist, however, is not a mere copyist, and hence, while the story starts from existing facts, and follows the general outline of the real, it is not the very image of the real, and makes deviations from the original facts to meet the exigencies of art. There is no difficulty, however, in recognizing the original of the incarnate fiend Heathcliff in the man Welsh, who tormented Hugh Bronte, Patrick's father, in the old family home near Drogheda. Had Welsh never played the demon among the Brontes, Emily Bronte had never placed on the canvas Heathcliff, "child neither of lascar nor gypsy, but a man's shape animated by demon life--a ghoul, an afrit." Nelly Dean, the benevolent but irresolute medium of romance and tragedy, is Hugh's Aunt Mary, clear-eyed as to right and duty, but ever slipping down before the force of circumstances. And old Gallagher, on the banks of the Boyne, with "the Blessed Virgin and all the saints" on his side, is none other than the original of the old hypocrite, Joe. Gallagher is Joe speaking the Yorkshire dialect. And Edgar Linton is the gentle and forgiving brother of Alice, our friend Red Paddy McClory, who took his sister home after her runaway marriage with a Protestant, and finally took the whole Bronte family under his roof, and gave them all he possessed. Even Catherine Linton's flight and marriage has solid foundation in fact, either in Alice Bronte's romantic elopement with Hugh, or in the more tragic circumstances of Mary Bronte's marriage with Welsh. It is not credible that Patrick Bronte, in his story-telling moods, never narrated to his listening daughters the romance of their grandfather and grandmother. It is true Miss Nussey never heard any reference to the story, nor did the Brontes ever in her presence refer to their Irish home or friends or history, though, at the very time she was visiting Haworth, they were in constant communication with their Irish relatives, and, as we shall see, one of the uncles actually visited them, as Charlotte's champion, and one of them had visited Haworth at an earlier date. They were too proud to talk even to their most intimate friends of their Irish home, much less to expose the foibles of their immediate ancestors to phlegmatic English ears; but Patrick Bronte would not omit to tell his story-loving daughters the thrilling adventures of their ancestors, and the girls, having brooded over the incidents, reproduced them in variant forms, and in the sombre setting of their own surroundings.