A GOSSIPLESS SEWING CIRCLE

New Zealand Tablet, 2 January 1913, Page 9

A GOSSIPLESS SEWING CIRCLE

‘ I really wish you could have timed your visit so as to be here last week/ said Aunt Amelia Bates rousing herself suddenly, and regarding her niece with eyes that betrayed no sign of the little nap into which she had unintentionally fallen. ‘ The sewing-circle met with me Wednesday, and we had a most delightful time/ b ‘Some particularly interesting piece of gossip?' asked Miss Eleanor mischievously, ‘There wasn’t any gossip, and there never is’ a answered the old lady, with dignity. ‘That is one of V ,jour strictest rules.' ‘A gossipless sewing-circle! Why, that makes it almost unique, doesn’t it? Has it always been conducted on that plan?' ‘ Not always, but a good while/ replied Aunt Amelia. ‘ Let’s see— year was it that the gristmill burned?’ .

A certain well-known twinkle in her eye showed that some little story was lurking in the near background that might be coaxed ’ forth' without much trouble. . v- _ 6S ' was thirty years ago last October that Mark Hoyt’s mill burned/ she went on, after a little mging. Mark s grandfather left him property, though not so much as people had expected, and he and his wife—she was Hattie Perley, from over in Oakfield—cut a good deal of a dash for a little while. But he hadn't shown much head for business, and it was generally understood- that he had lost pretty. nearly everything except the mill, and that even was almost an elephant on his hands, what with being out of repair and needing new machinery. So, when the mill burned one night, it made a good topic of conversation for our sewing-mrcle that happened to meet the next day with Mrs. Sylvester. J , How plain the talk in Mrs. Sylvester’s parlor that afternoon comes back to me after all those years! At first none of the ladies seemed to want to speak right out what they thought, but everybody was ready enough to hint all around it. Mrs. Bragg began by asking if anybody knew just how much the mill was insured for, and Mrs. Shaw said she understood there was nearly three thousand dollars on it, which was a deal more than the mill was worth. 4.1 4. t?? 6 ? N rs Saunders wanted to know if it was true that Mark had been trying to borrow money lately, and Mrs Squire Mace said she wasn’t at liberty to toll what she knew about that. ‘Mrs. Sylvester said that she wouldn’t want to be quoted, but a certain person had told her husband that he had it pretty straight that Mark had been seen coming away from the mill about an hour before the fire was discovered, and we all allowed that that looked a little queer, ‘ Aunt Loviny Farley asked Mrs. Mace if setting fire to property in the night for the sake of getting the insurance, wasn’t against the law, and Mrs. Mace 63 said that that would be arson, which was a State’s prison crime. Mrs. Timmons said she never supposed Mark would come to that, though she guessed that, in his younger days he’d sowed some oats of a kind that they didn’t grind m the mill. J Then old lady Shattuck said there were some bad streaks in the Hoyt blood; and she went on to tell a long story about how Mark’s Great-Uncle Daniel started oft to go fishing one Sunday, and his horse stepped into a hole m the road and broke his leg, and had to be killed, and Daniel went right straight to church with his old clothes on, pretending that there was where he had started for in the first place, and the next day sued the town and finally got' damages, which the law wouidnt have given him if it could have been proved that he was travelling for pleasure or on business on the Sabbath day. . ;- ,- - . - ~ . When she got done, I put in my word, and said mat there was nothing that would, bring a man to ruin much quicker than an extravagant wife. I don't know why I said it either, for I had always liked Hattie Hoyt, even if she did dress a little better than some others. _ But that is always the way; when that kind or talk is going on, it is easy to join in. n 4.1 '^• rs : .^ >ar^es had been looking dreadful mysterious all the while, as if she knew a good deal, but when somebody asked her what she thought, she only shook her head. Ini one of the kind,” she said, “that when they cant say anything good about' people, don’t say anything at all.” Then she shut her lips together, and kept on looking mysterious. b ‘Finally Lois Griffin spoke up and said that she wasn t afraid to express her opinion right out loud before anyone ; but that was as far as Lois ever got, for lo and behold ! there was Mrs. Hattie Hoyt standing right in the doorway. b ‘ How she’d got there unknown to us was a puzzle at the time: but it seems that she had own o rAii r»rJ f/> )he back door and knocked, and Lyddie’ mlnTmZ Sylvester s youngest, had let her in and helped her off with her things in the kitchen, and then she had walked through to the best room without one of us hearing her.

‘ But at any' rate,' there she was now, and how much she had heard we didn’t know. She was pale, and her eyes looked as if she’d been having a good cry; but after we had all said, Howdy-do and she had been given a seat, she appeared more at her ease than anybody else in the room. She said we must excuse her for being late, and even as it was, she had only run in for a few minutes : while Mark was trying to get a nap. “He has been in a terrible state all day,” she : said, “and I knew that he was keeping something back from me. But finally I made him tell me what was on his mind, and he is feeling better now.” ‘ When she said that, so innocently, I guess we all caught our breath, but she didn’t seem to notice it. ‘ “Mark tells me,” she said; “that the insurance on the mill ran out three weeks ago, and he hadn’t got it renewed so the fire has left us with almost nothing that we can call our own. Mark blames himself for. neglecting it,” said she, “though I guess it was partly because he didn’t have the money handy to pay. - But I tell him that I shall be glad and thankful to my dying day that there was no insurance, for if there had been I suppose some people would have been ready to say that he set the fire himself to get the money.’ ‘ And when she said that, she didn't raise her voice a bit or seem anyways put out. She was always gentle and mild spoken, and never more so than at that minute; but if ever a rebuke found its way home, I guess that did. At any rate, a bed of peonies wouldn’t have been a shade redder than the faces round Mrs. Sylvester’s table just then, and for a minute or two I suppose it was about the quietest sewing-circle ever known. ‘ But we finally found our tongues, and managed to tell Mrs. Hoyt how sorry for her we were. It was awkward, but it didn’t last long, for pretty soon Hattie said she would have to be going. Of course Mrs. Sylvester urged her to stay, at any rate, till after supper; but she said that she mustn’t leave Mark any longer. As soon as she had fairly gone Lois Griffin said, “ I don't know how it is with tne rest of you, but I, for one, feel as if humble-pie was about all that I need for my supper,” ‘ “Well,” said Mrs. Parks, speaking in a way that she had, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, “ I’m sure that I didn’t say anything.” At that, Lois turned on her. “Yes, you did,too,” she said, “and you needn’t pretend! * You as much as said that there wasn’t any good that you could say of the Hoyts! And it wasn’t so. Mark Hoyt was always kind and generous when he had anything to do with; and there’s a number of good things that you could say about Hattie; one is that she was never given to backbiting her neighbors. ‘“But there, what’s the use?” Lois went on, a little cooler. “I guess this is a case where the pot needn’t call the kettle black. But I hope we have all learned a lesson, and I’m going to propose that we make it a rule at our circles hereafter to talk about something else besides people.” ‘Well, we all agreed to that; and I suppose this was the beginning of our gossipless sowing-circle, as you call it.’ ‘What became of Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt?’ asked Eleanor. 1 I think I never knew of their living here.’ ‘ Oh, they, moved away long before your time. The mill , burning down proved to be a good thing for •Mark, even if it wasn’t insured. He sold the site to Squire Mace for a small sum, and when they were getting ready to rebuild a little later, one of the workmen made a discovery. ‘ It was no less than a lot of gold coin hidden away under some of the foundation stones, and it was easy enough to explain how it happend to be there. ‘You see, Mark’s grandfather, in the time of the f jwar, didn’t have any faith in the government, and it /was supposed then that he was hoarding up all the gold that he could get hold of. Some was found after he died, but it seemed that most of it, some three thousand dollars in all, he’d hidden there under the mill. ‘ Squire Mace felt that it rightly belonged to Mark, and of course it was quite a windfall. Instead of risk-

ing it in business, for which he had no head,, he spent most of it studying to be. a doctor, and he finally went West to practise, and has been successful. He was back here on a visit two or three years ago.’ • ‘ And hasn’t your no-gossip rule been broken iii all these years?’ asked Miss Eleanor. .' ‘ Well, not very often. Once in a while, at the beginning, somebody would forget, but the offender was likely to be brought up with a round turn: and of late years the ladies liave got into the habit of discussing things that are going on in the world outside of Greenhill. they react a good deal and are pretty well informed. And I guess, Eleanor, it’s when people have no interest in things that are worth '"while that they are most tempted to indulge in frivolous, unkind gossip. ‘ As your Grandfather Watts used to say, when the brain is empty the tongue will wa g.’—Youth’s Companion.