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.

“There’ll be nine to-day, as I makes it out.  I counted ’em up several times last night.”

It was evidently a great day in her eyes.

“But you’ve allowed room for many more than nine,” I pointed out.

“Why, of course.  There’s some brings their elder childer for a treat—­an’ there’s always ’Melia Penaluna.”

I was on the point of asking who Amelia Penaluna might be, when my attention was drawn to the small eastern window.  Just outside, and but a dozen paces from the house, there stretched a sullen pond, over which the wind drove in scuds and whipped the sparse reeds that encroached around its margin.  Beside the further bank of the pond the high-road was joined by a narrow causeway that led down from the northern fringe of Woon Down; and along this causeway moved a procession of women and children.