Hanging Gate departed with the stage coach. A long horse-trough by the side of the inn front still stands to remind the wayfarer of the days when the highway was quick with traffic, but the sign itself bears eloquent testimony of decay and fallen fortunes though it still flaunts its ancient legend on a miniature crate that rocks and creaks over the narrow doorway:

“This Gate hangs well and hinders none;

Refresh and pay and travel on.”

But on a certain winter’s night of 183—, when this story opens, the guest more bent upon refreshing than travelling on might have pleaded good excuse. Outside, the snow lay upon field and road knee-deep, the thatches, gables, and very faces of the scattered houses of Wakey were splashed and bespattered with snow, which for days had fallen in big flakes, silent and sad as the grey leaves of latest autumn, making thick the air as with the lighting of grasshoppers. The moon in the low-hanging sky was veiled by heavy masses of dark cloud that stole across the heavens like mutes oppressed by the sombre garb of woe. Signs of life about the Wakey there seemed none, save the mellowed light that shone across the bisecting roads from the curtained lattices of the Hanging Gate. It was eight o’clock and the hand-loom weavers or mill-hands habiting the small stone-build houses that straggled from the valley up the bleak sides of Harrop Edge had gone to bed, not so much because they were weary as to save fire and light. The village smithy flanking the stables of the Hanging Gate was closed and the smith himself, big burly Jim o’ Little Hannah’s had forged his last shoe and blown the last blast from his bellows, poured his last pint down his throat in the neighbouring taproom and trudged home to his little wife and large family. The few frequenters of the tap-room had tarried till tarry they might no longer, for times were bad, money was scarce and the credit given by the best of innkeepers has its limits.

Mrs. Betty Schofield, the buxom hostess of the Hanging Gate was no wise dismayed by the slackness of her custom. Rumour had it that Betty was a very warm woman. She had been some years a widow, and her husband had left her, as the gossips said, well worth picking up. Look at her as she sits in the long kitchen before a roaring fire of mingled coal, peat and logs. Below the medium height, with wavy brown hair, a soft brown eye, a dimpled chin, now inclined to the double, a full and swelling bust, a mouth not too small and smiling lips that parted only to display a perfect set of teeth—it does one good to look upon her rosy cheek.—Happy the man, you say, who shall own those ample charms and 

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