There was a little whitewashed cottage on the edge of the moorland just after the hedgerows ceased—­the last house before the barren heath began, standing a full three hundred yards from any other dwelling.  Its front faced the road, and at the back an outhouse and a wretched garden jutted out on the waste land.  There was a light in each of its windows tonight, and as I passed down the road I heard the dismal music of a flute.

Perhaps it was this that jogged my thoughts and woke them up to my present pass.  At any rate, I had not gone more than twenty yards before I turned and made for the door.  The people might give me a night’s lodging in the outhouse; at any rate, they would not refuse a crust to stay the fast which I had not broken since the morning.  I tapped gently with my knuckles on the door, and listened.

I waited five minutes, and no one answered.  The flute still continued its melancholy tune; it was evidently in the hands of a learner, for the air (a dispiriting one enough at the best) kept breaking off suddenly and repeating itself.  But the performer had patience, and the sound never ceased for more than two seconds at a time.  Besides this, nothing could be heard.  The blinds were drawn in all the windows.  The glow of the candles through them was cheerful enough, but nothing could be seen of the house inside.  I knocked a second time, and a third, with the same result.  Finally, tired of this, I pushed open the low gate which led into the garden behind, and stole round to the back of the cottage.

Here, too, the window on the ground floor was lit up behind its blinds, but that of the room above was shuttered.  There was a hole in the shutter, however, where a knot of the wood had fallen out, and a thin shaft of light stretched across the blackness and buried itself in a ragged yew-tree at the end of the garden.  From the loudness of the sounds I judged this to be the room where the flute-playing was going on.  The crackling of my footsteps on the thin soil did not disturb the performer, so I gathered a handful of earth and pitched it up against the pane.  The flute stopped for a minute or so, but just as I was expecting to see the shutter open, went on again:  this time the air was “Pretty Polly Oliver.”

I crept back again, and began to hammer more loudly at the door.  “Come,” said I, “whoever this may be inside, I’ll see for myself at any rate,” and with that I lifted the latch and gave the door a heavy kick.  It flew open quite easily (it had not even been locked), and I found myself in a low kitchen.  The room was empty, but the relics of supper lay on the deal table, and the remains of what must have been a noble fire were still smouldering on the hearthstone.  A crazy, rusty blunderbuss hung over the fireplace.  This, with a couple of rough chairs, a broken bacon-rack, and a small side-table, completed the furniture of the place.  No; for as I sat down to make a meal off the remnants of supper, something lying on the lime-ash floor beneath this side-table caught my eye.  I stepped forward and picked it up.