‘I wonder what old Barliman was hinting at,’ said Frodo.

‘I can guess some of it,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘What I saw in the Mirror: trees cut down and all, and my old gaffer turned out of the Row. I ought to have hurried back quicker.’

‘And something’s wrong with the Southfarthing evidently,’ said Merry. ‘There’s a general shortage of pipe-weed.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Pippin, ‘Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.’

‘Deep in, but not at the bottom,’ said Gandalf. ‘You have forgotten Saruman. He began to take an interest in the Shire before Mordor did.’

‘Well, we’ve got you with us,’ said Merry, ‘so things will soon be cleared up.’

‘I am with you at present,’ said Gandalf, ‘but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.

‘But if you would know, I am turning aside soon. I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another.’

In a little while they came to the point on the East Road where they had taken leave of Bombadil; and they hoped and half expected to see him standing there to greet them as they went by. But there was no sign of him; and there was a grey mist on the Barrow-downs southwards, and a deep veil over the Old Forest far away.

They halted and Frodo looked south wistfully. ‘I should dearly like to see the old fellow again,’ he said. ‘I wonder how he is getting on?’

‘As well as ever, you may be sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘Quite untroubled and I should guess, not much interested in anything that we have done or seen, unless perhaps in our visits to the Ents. There may be a time later for you to go and see him. But if I were you, I should press on now for home, or you will not come to the Brandywine Bridge before the gates are locked.’

‘But there aren’t any gates,’ said Merry, ‘not on the Road; you know that quite well. There’s the Buckland Gate, of course; but they’ll let me through that at any time.’

‘There weren’t any gates, you mean,’ said Gandalf. ‘I think you will find some now. And you might have more trouble even at the Buckland Gate than you think. But you’ll! manage all right. Good-bye dear friends! Not for the last time, not yet. Good-bye!’

He turned Shadowfax off the Road, and the great horse leaped the green dike that here ran beside it; and then at a cry from Gandalf he was gone, racing towards the Barrow-downs like a wind from the North.

‘Well here we are, just the four of us that started out together,’ said Merry. ‘We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.’

‘Not to me,’ said Frodo. ‘To me it feels more like falling asleep again.’

Chapter 8

The Scouring of the Shire

It was after nightfall when, wet and tired, the travellers came at last to the Brandywine, and they found the way barred. At either end of the Bridge there was a great spiked gate; and on the further side of the river they could see that some new houses had been built: two-storeyed with narrow straight-sided windows, bare and dimly lit, all very gloomy and un-Shirelike.

They hammered on the outer gate and called, but there was at first no answer; and then to their surprise someone blew a horn, and the lights in the windows went out. A voice shouted in the dark:

‘Who’s that? Be off! You can’t come in: Can’t you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise ?’

‘Of course we can’t read the notice in the dark.’ Sam shouted back. ‘And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I’ll tear down your notice when I find it.’

At that a window slammed, and a crowd of hobbits with lanterns poured out of the house on the left. They opened the further gate, and some came over the bridge. When they saw the travellers they seemed frightened.

‘Come along!’ said Merry, recognizing one of the hobbits. ‘If you don’t know me, Hob Hayward, you ought to. I am Merry Brandybuck, and I should like to know what all this is about, and what a Bucklander like you is doing here. You used to be on the Hay Gate.’

‘Bless me! It’s Master Merry, to be sure, and all dressed up for fighting!’ said old Hob. ‘Why, they said you was dead! Lost in the Old Forest by all accounts. I’m pleased to see you alive after all!’

‘Then stop gaping at me through the bars, and open the gate!’ said Merry.

‘I’m sorry, Master Merry, but we have orders.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘The Chief’s up at Bag End.’

‘Chief? Chief? Do you mean Mr. Lotho?’ said Frodo.

‘I suppose so, Mr. Baggins; but we have to say just “the Chief” nowadays.’

‘Do you indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘Well, I am glad he has dropped the Baggins at any rate. But it is evidently high time that the family dealt with him and put him in his place.’

A hush fell on the hobbits beyond the gate. ‘It won’t do no good talking that way,’ said one. ‘He’ll get to hear of it. And if you make so much noise, you’ll wake the Chief’s Big Man.’

‘We shall wake him up in a way that will surprise him,’ said Merry. ‘If you mean that your precious Chief has been hiring ruffians out of the wild, then we’ve not come back too soon.’ He sprang from his pony, and seeing the notice in the light of the lanterns, he tore it down and threw it over the gate. The hobbits backed away and made no move to open it. ‘Come on, Pippin!’ said Merry. ‘Two is enough.’

Merry and Pippin climbed the gate, and the hobbits fled. Another horn sounded. Out of the bigger house on the right a large heavy figure appeared against a light in the doorway.

‘What’s all this,’ he snarled as he came forward. ‘Gate-breaking? You clear out, or I’ll break your filthy little necks!’ Then he stopped, for he had caught the gleam of swords.

‘Bill Ferny,’ said Merry, ‘if you don’t open that gate in ten seconds, you’ll regret it. I shall set steel to you, if you don’t obey. And when you have opened the gates you will go through them and never return. You are a ruffian and a highway-robber.’

Bill Ferny flinched and shuffled to the gate and unlocked it. ‘Give me the key!’ said Merry. But the ruffian flung it at his head and then darted out into the darkness. As he passed the ponies one of them let fly with his heels and just caught him as he ran. He went off with a yelp into the night and was never heard of again.

‘Neat work, Bill,’ said Sam, meaning the pony.

‘So much for your Big Man,’ said Merry. ‘We’ll see the Chief later. In the meantime we want a lodging for the night, and as you seem to have pulled down the Bridge Inn and built this dismal place instead, you’ll have to put us up.’

‘I am sorry, Mr. Merry,’ said Hob, ‘but it isn’t allowed.’

‘What isn’t allowed?’

Taking in folk off-hand like and eating extra food, and all that, said Hob.

‘What’s the matter with the place?’ said Merry. ‘Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.’

‘Well no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these “gatherers” and “sharers”, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’

‘Oh come!’ said Pippin yawning. ‘This is all too tiresome for me tonight. We’ve got food in our bags. Just give us a room to lie down in. It’ll be better than many places I have seen.’