“Spirits! Why, you never have the chance of interfering with their little games.” She shook her head. “I won’t say that, sir,” she answered. “There’s queer things about at night, but I always gives ’em a good word and a text of Scriptur’, and they don’t hurt me.” It used to be thought that a comet presaged war, that its tail tickled all the elements of irritation in the world and sent nations and kingdoms flying at one another. But this human comet, Mary Trembath, revolving in her elliptical orbits through the country, left peace and goodwill after her. She was an inveterate gossip, a chatterbox. She loved, when she had sold a paper of pins or a knot of tape, to sit and have a dish of tea and a bit of cake and talk, but never, so far as I am aware, did evil spring from what she said; on the contrary, she left those she had been with better disposed towards one another than they had been before. A somewhat singular instance of this occurs to my memory. There were two old ladies, spinsters both, who lived within a mile and a half of each other. One was the housekeeper to her brother, a farmer, who was a widower, and the other resided in a pleasant cottage of her own, surrounded by trees, smothered in laurels and snowberries that cut off sun and air, and made garden and house smell of mildew and moth. Now this old lady had a sharp tongue and a lively imagination, and had the credit of being a mischief-maker. All at once a tremendous feud broke out between these spinsters. It involved more than themselves, their relations, their acquaintances also, in the village. Miss Spindle had said something very nasty and galling of Miss Shank that was absolutely untrue, but so injurious that Miss Shank vowed she would have the law of her. Hearing of this, and finding the entire village agitated by the controversy, I tried to discover the truth—whether Miss Spindle really had spoken such cruel things of Miss Shank. I tracked the story from one to another, and found that gradually every objectionable expression and statement fell off _en route_ as an assertion, and that what had actually been said was entirely harmless, for it was not said of Miss Shank at all, but of the shank-bone of mutton on which Miss Spindle had been making her meal. In fact, all this good lady had said was, that the shank had been served so often that it was becoming high and discoloured, and had best be hashed. Out of this a mountain of malignant insinuation and defamatory assertion had been evolved.