The last that has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern house in S-------, New Hampshire.

The landlord was a spiteful little man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his larder.

He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next town.

Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes, broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen, unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets.

And if, as a matter of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "somethin' warmin'," the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that, on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his gullet.
As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like an armed man.