Three ladies, a widow, a widow bewitched, and a middle-aged single woman, namely, Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross, had gone immediately, on observing that the stage had dropped two passengers with the widow, to ascertain who they were, where they came from, what they had in view, and whither they were going next. All the information, however, that Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross had been enabled to obtain, (albeit they would have wormed the one secret which a man ought to keep from his wife out of him, after the Holy Inquisition had given him up in despair,) was, that Mrs. Wilkins had taken a man and his wife to board at her house; and that their name was Tompkins. They had retired to their own apartment, and had not been seen by the respectable triad; yet Miss Cross said, she thought from the looks of an old pair of boots, which were tied to one of Mr. Tompkins's trunks, which was standing in the entry, that 'they were no great shakes.' As to this point she had a right also to speak her opinion, seeing that her father had been a respectable retail shoe-maker. So, therefore, the report of Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Hawkins, and Miss Cross, did but whet the curiosity of the congregation as to the private history, present estate, and future prospects of poor Mr. Tompkins and his wife. Many supposed that his name was assumed for the occasion. So many, they urged, were indicted or sued, who had such an alias, that he must have broken out of the state prison, or run away and left his bail in the lurch. An inveterate reader of all the newspapers observed, that a Mr. Tompkins was advertised as having left his wife without any means of subsistence, who would pay no debts contracted by him. It was probable that he had a female partner of his flight; and the circumstance of his coming in such a clandestine way to the house of the widow Wilkins, was certainly a singular coincidence. It would be endless, and scarcely amusing, to mention all the suppositions broached on the subject. One, which was quite popular, was, that this Mr. Tompkins must be the man who had been hanged in Alabama some months before, and who, it was rumored, had been resuscitated. The most speculatively benevolent hoped that these people would be able to pay their board to the widow, as she was a good sort of woman, though none of the wisest, and could not afford to lose it. The most scrupulously decorous hoped this couple were actually married, and had not come to bring disgrace into Mrs. Wilkins's house, as she had always passed for an honest woman, as had her mother before her, though there had been some strange stories about her aunt and the Yankee doctor.