The green letter always came just as the leaves were turning,
addressed to the eldest of the three grim men, with a wonderful
Chinese stamp and the Otford post-mark, and Amuel Sleggins carried it
up to the house.

He was not afraid to go, for he always took the letter, had done so
for seven years, yet whenever summer began to draw to a close, Amuel
Sleggins was ill at ease, and if there was a touch of autumn about
shivered unduly so that all folk wondered.

And then one day a wind would blow from the East, and the wild geese
would appear, having left the sea, flying high and crying strangely,
and pass till they were no more than a thin black line in the sky like
a magical stick flung up by a doer of magic, twisting and twirling
away; and the leaves would turn on the trees and the mists be white on
the marshes and the sun set large and red and autumn would step down
quietly that night from the wold; and the next day the strange green
letter would come from China.

His fear of the three grim men and that secretive woman and their
lonely, secluded house, or else the cadaverous cold of the dying
season, rather braced Amuel when the time was come and he would step
out bolder upon the day that he feared than he had perhaps for weeks.
He longed on that day for a letter for the last house in the lane,
there he would dally and talk awhile and look on church-going faces
before his last tramp over the lonely wold to end at the dreaded door
of the queer grey house called wold-hut.

When he came to the door of wold-hut he would give the postman's knock
as though he came on ordinary rounds to a house of every day, although