gossip in history may
be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when
Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little "skike."
But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit
him virtuous.

A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and
there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be
leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this
truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for
them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by
thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and
off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady
who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a
knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.

[Illustration]

It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water
that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each
morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that
leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the
bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I'm told, though I answer not for
the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper
scandal being hissed about (a lady's maid affair), all the inmates became
distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To
this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to
the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.

This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it
allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead
of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is
true he had given me no "chill and arid knowledge" of Shakespeare, but I
had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It
were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full
acquittal.

No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf
where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it
upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom.
At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste
Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.

He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf bu