"May I see it?" I asked:
and the old man nodded.
It was the same face--the same suit, even--that had roused my contempt
eighteen months before.
WOON GATE.
It was on a cold and drenching afternoon in October that I spent an
hour at Woon Gate: for in all the homeless landscape this little
round-house offers the only shelter, its windows looking east and west
along the high-road and abroad upon miles of moorland, hedgeless,
dotted with peat-ricks, inhabited only by flocks of grey geese and a
declining breed of ponies, the chartered vagrants of Woon Down. Two
miles and more to the north, and just under the rim of the horizon,
straggle the cottages of a few tin-streamers, with their backs to the
wind. These look down across an arable country, into which the women
descend to work at seed-time and harvest, and whence, returning, they
bring some news of the world. But Woon Gate lies remoter. It was never
more than a turnpike; and now the gate is down, the toll-keeper dead,
and his widow lives alone in the round-house. She opened the door
to me--a pleasant-faced old woman of seventy, in a muslin cap, red
turnover, and grey gown hitched very high.
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