very handsome of 'en, they tell me. I can't
call to maind, tho', that I've a-zet eyes 'pon the young man since he
was a little tacker."

The old man began to fumble in his breastpocket, and drawing out a
photograph, handed it across.

"That's the last that was took of 'en."

"Pore young chap," said the farmer, holding the likeness level with
his eyes and studying it; "Pore young chap! Zuch a respectable lad to
look at! They tell me a' made ye a gude zon, too."

"Gude?" The tears ran down the father's face and splashed on his
hands, trembling as they folded over the knob of his stout stick.
"Gude? I b'lieve, vriends, ye'll call it gude when a young man zends
the third o' his earnin's week by week to help his parents. That's
what my zon did, vrum the taime he left whome. An' presunts--never a
month went by, but zome little gift ud come by the postman; an' little
'twas he'd got to live 'pon, at the best, the dear lad--"

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 wel