now-a-days exclusively used for bed-ticking. The leathern breeches
which a few years before were universal are still worn by a few in
spite of their discomfort in summer.

Behind the bar sits Widow Bingham, the landlady, a buxom, middle-aged
woman, whose sharp black eyes have lost none of their snap, whether
she is entertaining a customer with a little pleasant gossip, or
exploring the murky recesses of the room about the door, where she
well knows sundry old customers are lurking, made cowards of by
consciousness of long unsettled scores upon her slate. And whenever
she looks with special fixity into the darkness there is soon a
scuttling of somebody out of doors.

She pays little or no attention to the conversation of the men around
the bar. Being largely political, it might be expected to have the
less interest for one of the domestic sex, and moreover it is the same
old story she has been obliged to hear over and over every evening,
with little variation, for a year or two past.

For in those days, throughout Massachusetts, at home, at the tavern,
in the field, on the road, in the street, as they rose up, and as they
sat down, men talked of nothing but the hard times, the limited
markets, and low prices for farm produce, the extortions and
multiplying numbers of the lawyers and sheriffs, the oppressions of
creditors, the enormous, grinding taxes, the last sheriff's sale, and
who would be sold out next, the last batch of debtors taken to jail,
and who would go next, the utter dearth of money of any sort, the
impossibility of getting work, the gloomy and hopeless prospect for
the coming winter, and in general the wretched failure of the triumph
and independence of the colonies to bring about the public and private