SMALL TALK.

Bush Advocate, Volume VII, Issue 647, 9 July 1892, Page 6

SMALL TALK.

"I do not nialto calls," a gentleman said to the editor recently, " because I have grown so stupid that I am no longer able to ! talk. Igo and sit in stupid eilence, gazing at the hostess, as if I had come merely to pass some minutes iv silent admiration of her charms, and the situation is far too awkward to bo pleasant for either of us ; so j that I have about given it up." The editor, or coarse, discoursed wisely j upon the subject as is his wont. " It 5s not; iv the least a question of stupidity," he said, "it is pai'tly a matter of habit and partly the lack of continuity. To talk Bmall talk one must keep in practice, just as one must keep in practice in playiucc the piano. You cannot tako it up and lay it down at will. You must keep the mind an. the tongue limber, and if you really ■wiaiw be an axpert, I am not Rure that it is not necessary to keep up the practice alone at home." He smiled a little at the conceit, and wenfe on elaborating the idea. "It might be a good idea," ha said, "to have a dummy— a sort of a clay figure of the kind that artists have standing lop-sidely about their studios — and to take so much time each day to talk to it. It couW come about as near giving an intelligible answer > as many of the- persons to whom one is cxi peeted to talk in what is called ' society,' and it would accustom one to getting on without help. At any rate, whether this seems to be the boat method or not, one must keep his hand in." "But I have nothing to say," the other protested, " Ido not feel shy, and I do not know that age or disuse has greatly stiffened my tongue, but I find that there is nothing in the world that I am inclined to talk about." " That, too, is partly the result of a laok of practice," the editor went nn in his oraoular manner, "since it is the result of being oat of the current of email talk. Small talk is very largely made up of the little nothings of the day, and still more it is composed of the little nothings of ' society * aforesaid. There is about it something of the nature of the dost collected from the rugs and the carpets by the' broom of the housemaid ; it is made up of- tbreads of different hues brushed from each, figure in the pattern. Small talk is the fuzz brushed from each •wiire in tho social fnbrio. It is largely marie up of scraps of trivial inclination, comment, 'ir speculation in rejr.'ird to the persons who make up a {riven set. Ti> keep up with this i.- esientiul to being weU yip iv small talk.'* "In othw wjrds," the first speaker saij, "itia'argdly gossip." ■'That is not in all what I mean," the editor responded. "Of course sjossiji como=i imo it, but for tho mo&t par! it is of n natme too trivinl to be failed jrossip. It is tho mo>t airy, und trifling mention of this, that and the other. What one has raid about, nothing, where anot/isr has been, how still a third lookt'd ou a givaa occasion, the heulth of a fourth, and tho plans cf a fifth. It is not in the 'east ill-natured, is a rule; it is not even, in the smallest degree impertinent, or over, curious. It is only to the outeider hopelessly futile and impossible of imitation," — H&sfon Courier.