a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry. Originally covered with
stucco, the walls had peeled year by year until the dull red of the
bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder.
Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged
panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting
eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the
weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After
pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have
swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of
the wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room which sprouted, like
some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only
a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days to
attract a larger congregation of the righteous than had ever stood up
to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad
prospects were weighed here, weddings discussed, births and deaths
recorded in ever-green memories, and here, also, were reputations
demolished and the owners of them hustled with scant ceremony away to
perdition.

From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there
streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous
pine. Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then
the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and
capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had
successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her
own. Bottom's Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would
continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest
to the contrary. In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or
wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, beyond and above any
natural two-sided jars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs.