agreed it was in company with a man of bad character and vagrant habits;
all agreed, too, in the vague recollection of the child, and some
remembered that it was dressed in clothes finer than would have been
natural to an infant legally and filially appertaining to Mrs. Joplin.
One old woman remembered that on her reproaching Mrs. Joplin for some act
of great cruelty to the poor babe, she replied that it was not her flesh
and blood, and that if she had not expected more than she had got, she
would never have undertaken the charge. On comparing the information
gleaned at the previous places of their research, they found an entire
agreement as to the character personally borne by Mrs. Joplin. At the
village to which their inquiry had been first directed, she was known as
a respectable, precise young woman, one of a small congregation of rigid
Dissenters. She had married a member of the sect, and borne him a child,
which died two weeks after birth. She was then seen nursing another
infant, though how she came by it none knew. Shortly after this, her
husband, a journeyman carpenter of good repute, died; but to the surprise
of the neighbours, Mrs. Joplin continued to live as comfortably as
before, and seemed not to miss the wages of her husband,--nay, she rather
now, as if before kept back by the prudence of the deceased, launched
into a less thrifty mode of life, and a gayety of dress at variance both
with the mourning her recent loss should have imposed, and the austere
tenets of her sect. This indecorum excited angry curiosity, and drew
down stern remonstrance. Mrs. Joplin, in apparent disgust at this
intermeddling with her affairs, withdrew from the village to a small
town, about twenty miles distant, and there set up a shop. But her moral
lapse became now confirmed; her life was notoriously abandoned, and her
house the resort of all the reprobates of the place. Whether her means
began to be exhausted, or the scandal she provoked attracted the notice
of the magistrates and imposed a check on her course, was not very
certain, but she sold off her goods suddenly, and was next tracked to the