The farmer was passing back the photograph. "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. She wore no shoes inside her cottage, but went about in a pair of coarse worsted stockings on all days except the very rawest, when the chill of the lime-ash floor struck into her bones.
"May I wait a few minutes till the weather lifts?" I asked.
She smiled and seemed almost grateful.
"You'm kindly welcome, be sure: that's if you don't mind the
Vaccination."
I suppose that my face expressed some wonder: for she went on, shaking my dripping hat and hanging it on a nail by the fire—
"Doctor Rodda'll be comin' in half-an-hour's time. 'Tis district
Vaccination to-day, and he always inoculates here, 'tis so handy."
She nodded her head at half a dozen deal chairs and a form arrayed round the wall under a row of sacred texts and tradesmen's almanacks.