The bar room had undergone no material change, so far as its furniture and arrangements were concerned; but a very great change was apparent in the condition of these.  The brass rod around the bar, which, at my last visit was brightly polished, was now a greenish-black, and there came from it an unpleasant odor of verdigris.  The walls were fairly coated with dust, smoke, and fly-specks, and the windows let in the light but feebly through the dirt-obscured glass.  The floor was filthy.  Behind the bar, on the shelves designed for a display of liquors, was a confused mingling of empty or half-filled decanters, cigar-boxes, lemons and lemon-peel, old newspapers, glasses, a broken pitcher, a hat, a soiled vest, and a pair of blacking brushes, with other incongruous things, not now remembered.  The air of the room was loaded with offensive vapors.

Disgusted with every thing about the bar, I went into the sitting-room.  Here, there was some order in the arrangement of the dingy furniture; but you might have written your name in dust on the looking-glass and table.  The smell of the torpid atmosphere was even worse than that of the bar-room.  So I did not linger here, but passed through the hall, and out upon the porch, to get a draught of pure air.

Slade still sat leaning against the wall.

“Fine day this,” said he, speaking in a mumbling kind of voice.

“Very fine,” I answered.

“Yes, very fine.”

“Not doing so well as you were a few years ago,” said I.

“No—­you see—­these—­these ’ere blamed temperance people are ruining everything.”

“Ah!  Is that so?”

“Yes.  Cedarville isn’t what it was when you first came to the
‘Sickle and Sheaf.’  I—­I—­you see.  Curse the temperance people! 
They’ve ruined every thing, you see.  Every thing!  Ruined—­”

And he muttered and mouthed his words in such a way, that I could understand but little he said; and, in that little, there was scarcely any coherency.  So I left him, with a feeling of pity in my heart for the wreck he had become, and went into the town to call upon one or two gentlemen with whom I had business.

In the course of the afternoon, I learned that Mrs. Slade was in an insane asylum, about five miles from Cedarville.  The terrible events of the day on which young Hammond was murdered completed the work of mental ruin, begun at the time her husband abandoned the quiet, honorable calling of a miller, and became a tavern-keeper.  Reason could hold its position no longer.  When word came to her that Willy and his mother were both dead, she uttered a wild shriek, and fell down in a fainting fit.  From that period the balance of her mind was destroyed.  Long before this, her friends saw that reason wavered.  Frank had been her idol.  A pure, bright, affectionate boy he was, when she removed with him from their pleasant cottage-home, where all the surrounding influences were good, into a tavern, where an angel could scarcely remain without corruption.  From the moment this change was decided on by her husband, a shadow fell upon her heart.  She saw, before her husband, her children, and herself, a yawning pit, and felt that, in a very few years, all of them must plunge down into its fearful darkness.