t was unjust, she was sorry for it, but the misfortune
must be his, and he must place it to the account of his having made some
enemies, which she could not help.

As to his credit, the slander of the first lady's raising was spread
industriously, and with the utmost malice and bitterness, and did him an
inexpressible prejudice; every man he dealt with was shy of him; every
man he owed any thing to came for it, and, as he said, he was sure he
should see the last penny demanded; it was his happiness that he had
wherewith to pay, for had his circumstances been in the least perplexed,
the man had been undone; nay, as I have observed in another case, as his
affairs might have lain, he might have been able to have paid forty
shillings in the pound, and yet have been undone, and been obliged to
break, and shut up his shop.

It is true, he worked through it, and he carried it so far as to fix the
malice of all the reports pretty much upon the first lady, and
particularly so far as to discover that she was the great reason of his
being so positively rejected by the other; but he could never fix it so
upon her as to recover any damages of her, only to expose her a little,
and that she did not value, having, as she said wickedly, had her full
revenge of him, and so indeed she had.

The sum of the matter is, and it is for this reason I tell you the
story, that the reputation of a tradesman is too much at the mercy of
men's tongues or women's either; and a story raised upon a tradesman,
however malicious, however false, and however frivolous the occasion, is
not easily suppressed, but, if it touches his credit, as a flash of fire
it spreads over the whole air like a sheet; there is no stopping it.

My inference from all this shall be very brief; if the tongues of every
ill-disposed envious gossip, whether man-gossip or woman-gossip, for
there are of both sorts, may be thus mischievous to the tradesman, and
he is so much at the mercy of the tattling slandering part of the world,
how much more should tradesmen be cautious and wary how they touch or
wound the credit and character of one another. There are but a very few
tradesmen who can say they are out of the reach of slander, and that the
malice of enemies cannot hurt them with the tongue. Here and there one,
and those ancient and well established, may be able to defy the world;
but there are so many others, that I think I may warn all tradesmen
against making havoc of one anoth