ust him now for another ten. Man was made a little lower than the
angels, the Good Book says, and I reckon that's right; but he was made
a good while ago, and he hasn't kept very well. Yet there are a heap
of women in this world who are still right in the seraphim class. When
your conscience doesn't tell you what to do in a matter of right and
wrong, ask your wife.

Naturally, the story of Buck's final celebration came to the gossips
like a thousand-barrel gusher to a drilling outfit that's been finding
dusters, and they went one at a time to tell Mrs. Buck all the
dreadful details and how sorry they were for her. She would just sit
and listen till they'd run off the story, and hemstitched it, and
embroidered it, and stuck fancy rosettes all over it. Then she'd smile
one of those sweet baby smiles that women give just before the
hair-pulling begins, and say:

"Law, Mrs. Wiggleford"--the deacon's wife was the one who was
condoling with her at the moment--"people will talk about the best of
us. Seems as if no one is safe nowadays. Why, they lie about the
deacon, even. I know it ain't true, and you know it ain't true, but
only yesterday somebody was trying to tell me that it was right
strange how a professor and a deacon got that color in his beak, and
while it might be inflammatory veins or whatever he claimed it was,
she reckoned that, if he'd let some one else tend the alcohol barrel,
he wouldn't have to charge up so much of his stock to leakage and
evaporation."

Of course, Mrs. Buck had made up the story about the deacon, because
every one knew that he was too mean to drink anything that he could
sell, but by the time Buck's wife had finished, Mrs. Wiggleford was so
busy explaining and defending him that she hadn't any further interest
in Buck's case. And each one that called was sent away with a special
piece of home scandal which Mrs. Buck had invented to keep her mind
from dwelling on her neighbor's troubles.

She followed up her system, too, and in the end it got so that women
would waste good gossip before they'd go to her with it. For if the
pastor's wife would tell her "as a true friend" that the report that
she had gone to the theatre in St. Louis was causing a scandal, she'd
thank her for being so sweetly thoughtful, and ask if nothing was
sacred enough to be spared by the tongue of slander, though she, for
one, didn't believe that there was anything in the malicious talk that
the Doc was cribbing those