s one ear open toward the east and the other toward the west, and
hears everything in both directions. All the tittle-tattle of the world
pours into those ears like vinegar through a funnel. They are always up and
open, and to them a meeting of the sewing society is a jubilee and a
political campaign is heaven.

SIZE OF THROAT.

The snake has hard work to choke down a toad, and the crocodile has a
mighty struggle to take in the calf; but the monster of which I speak can
swallow anything. It has a throat bigger than the whale that took down the
minister who declined the call to Nineveh, and has swallowed whole
presbyteries and conferences of clergymen. A Brobdingnagian goes down as
easily as a Liliputian. The largest story about business dishonor, or
female frailty, or political deception, slips through with the ease of a
homoeopathic pellet. Its throat is sufficient for anything round, or
square, or angular, or octagonal.

Nothing in all the earth is too big for its mastication and digestion save
the truth, and that will stick in its gullet.

IT IS GREGARIOUS.

It goes in a flock with others of its kind. If one takes after a man or
woman, there are at least ten in its company. As soon as anything bad is
charged against a man, there are many others who know things just as
deleterious. Lies about himself, lies about his wife, lies about his
children, lies about his associates, lies about his house, lies about his
barn, lies about his store--swarms of them, broods of them, herds of them.
Kill one of them, and there will be twelve alive to act as its
pall-bearers, another to preach its funeral sermon, and still another to
write its obituary.

These monsters beat all the extinct species. They are white, spotted and
black. They have a sleek hide, a sharp claw and a sting in their tail. They
prowl through every street of the city, craunch in the restaurants, sleep
in the hall of Congress, and in grandest parlor have one paw under the
piano, another under the sofa, one by the mantel and the other on the
door-sill.

Now, many people spend half their time in hunting lies. You see a man
rushing anxiously about to correct a newspaper paragraph, or a husband,
with fist clenched, on the way to pound some one who has told a false thing
about his wife. There is a woman on the next street who heard, last Monday,
a falsehood about her husband, and has had her hat and shawl on ever since
in the effort to correct wrong impression