"Naw, naw. I be goin' up to berry 'en. Ees, vriends," he went on, looking around and asking, with that glance, the sympathy of all present, "to berry my zon, my clever zon, my only zon." Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Then the kindly farmer observed-- "Aye, I've heerd zay a' was very clever to his traäde. 'Uxtable an' Co., his employers, spoke 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 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--