n, and she lives at
the tavern."

"But don't you know that preaching is for the wicked, and that the good
had much better stay away than the bad?"

"Had they?" said Reuben, thoughtfully, pondering if there did not lie
somewhere in this averment the basis for some new moral adjustment of
his own conduct.

There are a vast many prim preachers, both male and female, in all
times, who imagine that certain styles of wickedness or vulgarity are to
be approached with propriety only across a church;--as if better
preaching did not lie, nine times out of ten, in the touch of a hand or
a whisper in the ear!

Pondering, as Reuben did, upon the repeated warnings of the spinster
against any familiarity with the tavern or tavern people, he came in
time to reckon the old creaking sign-board of Mr. Boody, and the pump in
the inn-yard, as the pivotal points of all the town wickedness, just as
the meeting-house was the centre of all the town goodness; and since the
great world was very wicked, as he knew from overmuch iteration at home,
and since communication with that wicked world was kept up mostly by the
stage-coach that stopped every noon at the tavern-door, it seemed to him
that relays of wickedness must flow into the tavern and town daily upon
that old swaying stage-coach, just as relays of goodness might come to
the meeting-house on some old lumbering chaise of a neighboring parson,
who once a month, perhaps, would "exchange" with the Doctor. And it
confirmed in Reuben's mind a good deal that was taught him about
natural depravity, when he found himself looking out with very much more
eagerness for the rumbling coach, that kept up a daily wicked activity
about the tavern, than he did for Parson Hobson, who snuffled in his
reading, and who drove an old, thin-tailed sorrel mare, with lopped ears
and lank jaws, that made passes at himself and Phil, if they teased her,
as they always did.

So, too, he came to regard, in virtue of misplaced home instruction, the
monkey-jacket of Nat Boody, and his fighting-dog "Scamp," and the pink
arms and pink cheeks and brown ringlets of Suke Boody, as so many types
of human wickedness; and, by parity of reasoning, he came to look upon
the two flat curls on either temple of his Aunt Eliza, and her pragmatic
way, and upon the yellow ribbons within the scoop-hat of Almira
Tourtelot, who sang treble and never went to the tavern, as the types of
goodness. What wonder, if he swayed more and more t