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The streets had emptied themselves of their rushing throngs, the patter of feet and the murmur of voices had given place to measured individual marches here and there, the dripping of cave-spouts and the flapping of awnings could be heard tattling of showers past and future, and the last organ-grinder had left the ungrateful city to its slumbers, when the poor girl first became conscious that she had been lugging hither and thither her entire outfit of wardrobe, valuables, and keepsakes.
The deacon's wife grew sick, and the vile, vinegar-tongued, vixenish virago said that the deacon was an old brute. The tattling, tiresome-tongued, town tale-bearer talked about a good many things that she might say, if she wanted to, and she did say that the deacon and his wife did not get on like angels. But the wee, wiry, weird Widow Wiggins watched wearily by the bedside of the sick Mrs.
It has occurred to me, since reading your letter, that she is not entirely without design in her prattle. Something more, methinks, than the mere tattling, gossiping, inquisitive propensity in the way in which she introduces you into conversation. She had not alighted ten minutes before she ran into my apartment, with a face full of intelligence.
He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and ducketing about? those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life?
It may seem absurd to some for a serious man like me solemnly to caper about in imitation of a scraping, grimacing French-Irishman; but Monson was right, and I haven't in the least minded the ridicule he has brought on me by tattling this and the other things everywhere, since he turned against me.
I am one of that kind that don't believe in making mischief, and if there's anything I do dispise, its tattling about my neighbors. It's a thing I never do, to talk against folks behind their back. There's plenty that do, though, in this very town.
Ransford's," said Mary. "I never saw him and I was in the garden, about that very time, with your stepson, Mr. Folliot." "So Sackville told me," remarked Folliot. "He was present and so was I when Mrs. Deramore was tattling about it in our house yesterday. He said, then, that he'd never seen the man go to your house. You never heard your servants make any remark about it?" "Never!" answered Mary.
One of the daughters of the royal pair, wearied with the forms and ceremonies of her state, which, in the most punctilious court in Europe, were especially trying, found means to converse with this well-appearing, quick-witted scamp. A tattling courtier, recalling a faux pas of the last queen, and desiring no more scandals, reported that the princess had been seen to smile on the youngster.
For instance, his lordship would send for me in his library, and say, sternly, 'Simpson, my valet Lagrange informs me that you are improperly intimate with one of the female domestics; you must stop it, or quit my service. And perhaps the next day he would again summon me before him, and, with that cursed valet grinning maliciously at me from behind his chair, say to me, 'Simpson, I hear that you make too free with my wine, and are frequently intoxicated; stop it, or I shall dismiss you. In short, Lagrange was the bane of my existence, and I secretly swore to be terribly revenged upon him for his tattling propensities.
These ladies perform the function, in fact, of the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and pseudo-Elizabethan plays. They are not quite so artless in their conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama. Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts.
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