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We have said that Tucker's house was desolate and forbidding whatever were its natural advantages. True, it lay in the direction many of the neighboring farmers took when by some one or another path, over the broad pastures and intervening wood-lands, they sought a nearer way than by the road to church, town meeting, public fair, or to their acquaintances and friends in other parts of the town, but seldom did the passers by call and go in. John was often seen at the door of his cabin smoking his pipe, or perhaps lounging around the premises in drunken, beastly imbecility and stupidity, or with bloated, haggard and glaring features, leaning over the fence, or hard up against a corner of his house; and Polly was like him. They were drunk together, and so if ever sober. Sometimes they were mutually very cross, savage and brutal; at other times they were simple, foolish and talkative. They had their seasons of spasmodic penitence, strange as it my seem! Then they confessed their sins, wept over their life, promised to do better, and to seek for the truth. But their goodness soon evaporated; their reforms were sure antecedents to a drunken revelry and row. In matters of ordinary worldly care, they were wholly thriftless, careless of property, reckless of to-morrows, wasters, wandering, dissolute vagabonds. Call them gipsies, but then they fell below the gipsy in point of true character. They were samples, good and true, of intemperance, ignorance, profanity and vice.

As for their dwelling, it never knew the luxury of paint, and seldom, except on its outside when the rains fell, did it enjoy the dashing over it of water, accompanied by the scrubbing hand of an active and energetic housewife. The floors were partly torn up for fuel; the clapboards on the outside stripped off for the same purpose, and the steps were gone -- probably the same way. The house throughout bore no marks of neatness, no signs of order; nothing within it was attractive. It had no carpets, no window curtains, no soft, downy beds and pillows; nor had it soft ottomans, tete-a-tetes, and no rocking-chairs, no neat crockery filled the closets, no well-furnished larder supplied the table-dinners; sadirons were wanting in the chimney fire-place, and the very wood on the fire was stolen from the fences and the neighboring forests, to the great irritation of the owners.

Notwithstanding these things, they brought up quite a family of children, some of whom, despite their parentage, went away at an early age, and, forming virtuous associations, became respected men and women! But they sought in vain to influence their parents to give up their nomadic for a fixed and virtuous mode of life: others lived with them and became likewise dissolute and wicked.

The house was the resort of the lowest vagrants. Men and women who wandered every where accursed by their own ways of wantonness and sin, here frequently passed whole days and nights together, carousing in the most disgusting ways, and separating only as hunger and thirst drove them asunder. These were for the most part the wandering subjects of the poor-house in town and out of it, or those who were from low groggeries here and there, rapidly forming characters for the institutions of vagrancy.

Out of this admixture of lewdness and criminality, occasionally it happened that the town gained a moiety of new population, despite the loss in morals and wholesome order. And so it sometimes happened, further, that the icy touch of death here rested on a victim, and then a funeral went forth from the drunken house of Tucker.

"Blarney Moll," as she was called, his oldest daughter, died here at twenty-three, a poor creature. And another perished in a city where she often strayed. The last that died was "Annie Sue," six years before this present time, at the age of twenty-five. She was a regular town- pauper -- was rather stupid, though not a very wild, noisy, daring creature, and she really bore some marks of feminine delicacy and interest. A child of hers died in two weeks from its birth, and the manner in which its place was supplied, brings us to an interesting part of our story.

We have spoken of the Warrens who lived in the neighborhood of Tuckers.

A young mother lay dying there. ***** Let us here mention something of her previous history:

Julia Carlile was the only child of Henry and Elizabeth Carlile, very respectable inhabitants of Crampton, who bestowed on her their united endearments, and commenced to give her a finished education. But before she was twelve years of age she lost her mother, and just after she was thirteen, her father. A great misfortune to a young girl -- a great, irreparable loss to Julia, who, in consequence, was thrown upon the care of an elderly aunt whose ways and government she thoroughly disliked. Naturally very impulsive, she grew to be extravagantly wild and thoughtless, neglectful of her studies and general cultivation of the mind, and graces of the heart and life. Mindful more of her own wishes than of her aunt's, and contrary to her expostulations, she permitted the attentions of James Sherman, a dashing blade of the town, a fond son of his parents, but a spendthrift, and in love with ways of life that awakened at first the solicitude of his father and mother, and at last their opposition and rebuke. In two months after tho sudden death of her aunt she was married to Sherman, then being nineteen years of age. Mr. Sherman was highly incensed and mortified. So much was he distressed at the conduct of his son, that he soon sold off all his property and removed to the West, leaving James a very slender portion. With care and economy even on this he might have built up for himself a small, quiet home, and have had a comfortable maintenance. But his pride was wounded, and he became by-and-bye more than usually idle and wasteful in his habits. Of course the path of temptation is ever widening to its victims, and James found it so. Not a great while was it ere he played hard and drank deep. Of Julia he was passionately and truly fond. They greatly loved each other, and the marriage had on her an effect directly the reverse of him -- she became more thoughtful and industrious. But James' love of his wife was not strong enough to save him, his evil genius triumphed -- not even the death of their first two children sobered and reformed him. He became ruinously intemperate, and before their third child was born forsook wife and home and sailed for the West Indies, where, she learned afterwards, soon after his arrival he fell a victim to the yellow fever.