A complete recantation and full apology followed, and the perpetrator of the scandal disappeared for many months from amid her circle of acquaintances.

The little leaven in the home.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

And is not silence golden in the home? If there is even one member who is kindly and charitable, and who makes allowances for small failings, looking for the good in everybody and taking a lenient view of other people’s shortcomings, the effect is surprising. The little leaven leaveneth the whole lump in time, and the “soft answer” becomes the fashion of the household. “How very rude Edith was this morning at the breakfast table!” says some one, feeling aggrieved by the harshness of some rebuke administered by one who had neither right nor reason to find fault. If the interlocutor replies, “Yes, shameful; I wouldn’t stand it; I should tell her of it, if I were you,” then the flame is fanned, and may result in a general conflagration, in which friendliness, goodwill, and serenity are consumed to ashes. But if a discreet silence on all aggravating circumstances is observed the affair may blow over very quietly. Suppose that some such reply as the following is made: “Oh, well, you know what Edith is. She is easily put out, and she had just had a very annoying letter. You may be sure she is very sorry by this time for the way she spoke to you.” At once the calming effect of gentleness and reticence is felt, and when the belligerents next meet it is only to find that peace is concluded, war at an end.

Blessed are the peacemakers!

Family amenities.

A perfectly frightful amount of talking goes on in some families. Each member is picked to pieces, as it were, motives found for her conduct that would astonish her indeed if she heard them attributed to her, and her kindest and most disinterested actions are distorted to suit the narrow minds and selfish ideas of those who are discussing her. Incapable of magnanimity themselves, such people translate kindheartedness and single-mindedness by the dim little light that is within their own petty minds, and the result is just what might be expected from the process. Light becomes darkness, purity foulness, goodness evil. There are women—not at all the worst in the world, but a silly, selfish, empty-headed class of unconscious mischief-makers—who, when they talk together, produce a kind of brew like that of the Witches in “Macbeth.”

“Fillet of a fenny snake
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,
Adder’s fork, and blindworm’s sting,
For a charm of powerful trouble
Let the hell-broth boil and bubble.”

The confidential whisperers.

Many a little fault, deeply repented, would pass and be forgotten, except in the sorrowing penitence of the faulty one, if only a stream of talk had not flowed around and about it, bitter as the waters of Marah. Often and often when friends look coldly on each other, each wondering why the other should seem estranged, the cause may be found to lie in a “long talk,” in which some one has indulged, with the result that actions are misrepresented, hasty words exaggerated, and charged with meaning they were never meant to carry, and remarks repeated in a manner that gives them an unkind bearing they were never intended to convey. “I wonder why Mary did not stop for a word or two, as she always does when we meet? She looked rather stiff, I thought.” “Oh, I suppose … has been talking to her and making mischief. You know what she is!”

Yes; that’s how it’s done. It is only what might be expected from poor Judy O’Grady; but the Colonel’s lady is not always above the level of the “whisperer” who “separates chief friends.”

I say again—