Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/223

Rh close it has passed through so many strange mutations that it bears not the slightest resemblance to the original phrase. Every one is requested, beginning at the last hearer, to declare what information concerning Mr. or Mrs. or Miss was confided to him, and lo! through these singular transitions, the harmless assertion has become a monstrous slander! This "scandal" was obviously the offspring of inadvertent, unconscious misrepresentation. As the story is traced back through all its crooked paths, the most hilarious merriment is excited by its odd metamorphoses.

The young play this game in jest, for the sake of the mirth it awakens; their seniors are playing it in sober, fatal earnest, all the world over, and like them, for the sake of mere amusement. Ay, playing it daily without self-reproach—playing it without dreaming that they are "coiners of scandal and clippers of reputation;" playing it without reflecting that their game can produce more dangerous consequences than the sport of the children!

Let us not confound these comparatively innocent scandalmongers with that venomous class whose adder-stings are aimed with malicious purpose, whose Upas breath withers the freshest flowers of Innocence with its invisible touch; whose defiled hands stir up the mud in purest streams of life; whose splenetic natures are constantly goaded by Envy and armed with the deadly weapons of Hatred. Against those, the sagest poet that the sun ever