Emily Brontë, one of the three gifted Brontë sisters, is the author of the famous English novel Wuthering Heights. She was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in England, the fifth of six children. In 1820, her family moved to Haworth,  39  her mother died in 1821 and her two elder sisters died in 1825. Her father, a minister, was a stern and sullen man, and the aunt who took over the household was more strict than loving. The four surviving children became a close-knit group and  40  one another with emotional and creative support.  41  in a small and remote community, the four siblings paired off and used their unusual literary gifts to write about imaginary lands. Emily and her younger sister Anne  42  the imaginary country of Gondal and wrote literature for it that included legends and poetry. Gondal remains a source of Emily’s later art, providing the setting, characters, and situations for many of her best dramatic poems and for her novel Wuthering Heights.

         A potato farmer was sent to prison just at the time when he should have been digging the ground for planting the new crop of potatoes. He knew that his wife would not be strong enough to do the digging by herself, but that she could manage to do the planting; and he also knew that he did not have any friends or neighbors who would be willing to do the digging for him. So he wrote a letter to his wife which said, “Please do not dig the potato field. I hid the money and the gun there.”

         Ten days later he got a letter from his wife. It said, “I think somebody is reading your letters before they go out of the prison. Some policemen arrived here two days ago and dug up the whole potato field. What should I do now?”

         The farmer wrote back at once, “Plant the potatoes, of course.”

         A suspension bridge is a type of bridge that use overhead cables to support its roadway. The design of a suspension bridge is simple and straightforward, and uses several architectural techniques to distribute the weight of the bridge safely and evenly.

         The construction of a suspension bridge starts with its towers, which are usually located on dry land and anchored to bedrock. Once the towers are built, master cables are strung across them and anchored into the bank at both ends of the bridge. Next, suspension cables are strung from the master cables, and then the deck used as roadway is attached to them. Most of the weight of the bridge is transferred by the cables to the anchorage systems. These are embedded in either solid rock or huge concrete blocks. Inside the anchorages, the cables are spread over a large area to evenly distribute the load and to prevent the cables from breaking free.

         One of the oldest engineering forms, suspension bridges were constructed by primitive peoples using thick vines for cables. A much stronger type was introduced in India around 400 A.D. that used cables of braided bamboo. In the early nineteenth century, suspension bridges used iron chains for cables. Today, the cables are made of thousands of individual steel wires bound tightly together. A single steel wire, only 0.1 inch thick, can support over half a ton of weight without breaking.

         Light and strong, a suspension bridge could span distances from 2,000 to 7,000 feet, which is much longer than any other kind of bridge could. Its simple design allows high clearance under the deck, useful when the bridge is built over a major shipping waterway or a very deep gulf. A suspension bridge is also less subjected to collapse than some other bridge types such as those built on support pillars.