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Updated: June 27, 2025
Suddenly on my left I heard the hoot of another car, and realized to my horror that I was almost up on a couple of gate-posts through which a private road debouched on the highway. My horn gave an agonized roar, but it was too late. I clapped on my brakes, but my impetus was too great, and there before me a car was sliding athwart my course. In a second there would have been the deuce of a wreck.
Pete objected somewhat to this pointed abbreviation of his name, but forgave his friend on the grounds that he was drunk; so the two went on and sought their rendezvous. The ladies were waiting, seated expectantly on the gate-posts, but descended at Ringtail's call, and the "swell gent" was formally introduced.
On the gate-posts, at the entrance, were the nests of two oven-birds, like those we had already seen on the telegraph-posts, so exactly spherical as to look like ornaments. In one of the shrubberies a fine jaguar was shut up in a cage, who looked very like a tiger.
The only way was up the pike, and the only break was a gate opening into the field right on top of the hill. The gate was gone, but two huge wooden gate-posts, each a tree-trunk, still stood and barred the way. No cannon had room to turn in between them; a battery had tried and a pile of dead men, horses, and debris marked its failure.
On each of the gate-posts a crouching lion was outlined dimly against the fainting light, and, by crossing the street, we could see the upper line of a latticed gallery under the low roof. We took our stand within the empty doorway of a blackened house, nearly opposite, and there we waited, Nick murmuring all sorts of ridiculous things in my ear.
Centuries old, some of these massive walls must be often constructed doubtless from older monuments of dim religious purpose, just as some of the gate-posts were once menhirs and monoliths. The villagers have their rugged old churches, to which they resort for baptisms and burials, but on Sundays they go in greater numbers to the chapel or meeting-house.
Light is not seen; in darkness they dwell: Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there; On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.
It is well for us if we have learned to listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their commonwealth.
Outside the high gate of Bunhill Fields, we could do no more than read the great names lettered on the gate-posts, and peer through the iron barriers at the thickly clustered headstones within. But over against the cemetery we had access to the chapel where John Wesley preached for thirty years, and behind which he is buried.
They sent her into village shops to demand "a halfpenny- worth of pennies," they kept her shivering in the drive staring at the lions on the top of the gate-posts, to see them wag their tails when they heard the clock strike twelve; they despatched her into the garden with neat little packets of salt to put on the birds' tails, and watched the poor mite's efforts in contortions of laughter from behind the window curtains.
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