Explore "The Turnpike House" by Fergus Hume on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It stood where four roads met -- a square building of two storeys, with white-washed walls and a high slate roof. The fence, and the once trim garden, had vanished with the turnpike gate; and a jungle of gooseberry bushes, interspersed with brambles, shut off the house from the roads. And only by courtesy could these be so-called, for time and neglect had almost obliterated them.
On all sides stretched a flat expanse of reaped fields, bleak-looking and barren in the waning November twilight. Mists gathered thickly over ditch and hedge and stubbled furrow a constant dripping could be heard in the clumps of trees looming here and there in the fog.