idens
Betrothed and Free_, Blanche St. John Bellairs. Yet no one has ever
thought of writing about gossip for its own sweet sake.

Among every-day words perhaps the word "gossip" is more to be reckoned
with than any other in our language. The child who runs confidingly to
mother to report his grievance is a gossip; he is also an historian.
Certainly gossip is in its tone familiar and personal; it is the
familiar and personal touch which makes _Plutarch's Lives_ interesting.
At the root of the word "gossip," say etymologists, there lies an honest
Saxon meaning, "God's sib"--"of one kindred under God."

It would be only a misanthrope who would assert that he has no interest
in his fellows. He is invariably a selfish person who shuns personality
in talk and refuses to know anything about people; who says: "What is it
to me whether this person has heard Slezak in _Tannhaeuser_; what do I
care whether Mrs. So-and-So has visited the French play; what concern is
it of mine if Mr. Millions of eighty marries Miss Beautiful of eighteen;
what is it to me whether you have watched the agonies of a furnishing
party at Marshall Field's and have observed the bridegroom of tender
years victimized by his wife and mother-in-law with their appeals to his
excellent taste; of what interest to me are the accounts of the
dissolute excesses which interspersed the wild outbreaks of religious
fanaticism of Henry the Third of France?" This selfish person is also
very stupid, for nothing so augments conversation as a normal interest
in other people.

"I shook him well from side to side
Until his face was blue.
Come, tell me how you live, I cried,
And what it is you do."

This plan of Alice's _Through the Looking Glass_ ballad singer for
shaking conversation out of people, tho somewhat too strenuous, is less
fatiguing than Sherlock Holmes's inductive methods. Like Sherlock
without his excuse, the kind and generous must confess to a colossal
interest in the affairs of others. Gossip is the dialog of the drama of
mankind; and we have a right to introduce any innocent and graceful
means of thawing their stories from the actors, and of unraveling
dramatic knots. People with keen judgment of men and things gather the
harvest of a quiet eye; they see in the little world of private life
histories as wonderful and issues as great as those that get our
attention in literature, or in the theater, or in public life. Personal
gossip in its