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So you see that the head and front of Bell’s villainy was that he was a little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a gallows matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the contrary, if gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for clement judgment.

In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little “skike.” But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit him virtuous.

A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.

It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I’m told, though I answer not for the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper scandal being hissed about (a lady’s maid affair), all the inmates became distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.

This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is true he had given me no “chill and arid knowledge” of Shakespeare, but I had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full acquittal.

No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom. At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.

He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?