country by the name of the "Brig's Foot," which it derived from its
near proximity to the bridge that crossed the river--a slow-moving,
muddy stream, whose brackish waters seemed to have fallen asleep upon
their bed of fat, black ooze, while creeping onward to the sea, through
a long flat expanse of dreary marshes.

The "Brig's Foot" was kept by the Widow Mason and her son, both persons
of notoriously bad character. The old man had been killed a few months
before in a drunken brawl with some smugglers; and his name was held in
such ill odour that his ghost was reported to haunt the road leading to
C---- churchyard, which formed the receptacle, but it would seem not the
resting-place, of the dead.

None but persons of the very lowest description frequented the tavern.
Beggars made it their headquarters; smugglers and poachers their
hiding-place; and sailors, on shore for a spree, the scene of their
drunken revels. The honest labourer shunned the threshold as a moral
pest-house, and the tired traveller, who called there once, seldom
repeated the visit. The magistrates, who ought to have put down the
place as a public nuisance, winked at it as a necessary evil; the more
to be tolerated, as it was half a mile beyond the precincts of the town.

Outwardly the place had some attractive features, it was kept so
scrupulously clean. The walls were so white, the floor so neatly sanded,
and the pewter pots glittered so cheerily on the polished oak-table
which served for a bar, that a casual observer might reasonably have
expected very comfortable and respectable accommodation from a scene
which, though on an humble scale, promised so fair. Even the sleek,
well-fed tabby-cat purred so peacefully on the door-sill that she seemed
to invite the pedestrian to shelter and repose.

Martha Mason, the mistress of the house, was a bad woman, in the fullest
sense of the word. Cunning, hard-hearted, and avaricious, without pity,
and without remorse; a creature so hardened in the ways of sin, that
conscience had long ceased to offer the least resistance to the
perpetration of crime. Unfeminine in mind and person, you could scarcely
persuade yourself that the coarse, harsh features, and bristling hair
about the upper lip, belonged to a female, had not the untamed tongue,
ever active in abuse and malice, asserted its claim to the weaker sex,
and rated and scolded through the long day, as none but the tongue of a
bad woman can rate and scold. A