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. An accident had deprived the hideous old crone of the use of one of her legs, which she dragged after her by the help of a crutch. But though she could not move quickly in consequence of her lameness, she was an excellent hand at quickening the motions of those who had the misfortune to be under her control. Her son Robert, who went by the familiar appellation of "Bully Bob," was the counterpart of his mother. A lazy, drunken fellow, who might be seen from morning till night lounging, with his pipe in his mouth, on the well-worn settle at the door, humming some low ribald song to chase away the lagging hours, till the shades of evening roused him from his sluggish stupor to mingle with gamblers and thieves in their low debauch. The expression of this young man's face was so bad, and his manners and language so coarse and obscene, that he was an object of dislike and dread to his low associates, who regarded him as a fit subject for the gallows. In the eyes of his mother, Bob Mason was a very fine young man--a desirable mate for any farmer's daughter in the country.