But if journalistic reporting, on which some care and thought are bestowed, sometimes proves misleading, common rumour is far more prolific of things which would have been better expressed differently.  It is now (thank goodness!) a good many years since “spelling-bees” were a favourite amusement in London drawing-rooms.  The late Lady Combermere, an octogenarian dame who retained a sempiternal taste for les petits jeux innocents kindly invited a young curate whom she had been asked to befriend to take part in a “spelling-bee.”  He got on splendidly for a while, and then broke down among the repeated “n’s” in “drunkenness.”  Returning crestfallen to his suburban parish, he was soon gratified by hearing the rumour that he had been turned out of a lady’s house at the West End for drunkenness.

Shy people are constantly getting into conversational scrapes, their tongues carrying them whither they know not, like the shy young man who was arguing with a charming and intellectual young lady.

Charming Young Lady. “The worst of me is that I am so apt to be run away with by an inference.”

Shy Young Man. “Oh, how I wish I was an inference!”

When the late Dr. Woodford became Bishop of Ely, a rumour went before him in the diocese that he was a misogynist.  He was staying, on his first round of Confirmations, at a country house, attended by an astonishingly mild young chaplain, very like the hero of The Private Secretary.  In the evening the lady of the house said archly to this youthful Levite, “I hope you can contradict the story which we have heard about our new bishop, that he hates ladies.”  The chaplain, in much confusion, hastily replied, “Oh, that is quite an exaggeration; but I do think his Lordship feels safer with the married ladies.”

Let me conclude with a personal reminiscence of a “Thing one would rather have left unsaid.”  A remarkably pompous clergyman who was an Inspector of Schools showed me a theme on a Scriptural subject, written by a girl who was trying to pass from being a pupil-teacher to a schoolmistress.  The theme was full of absurd mistakes, over which the inspector snorted stertorously.  “Well, what do you think of that?” he inquired, when I handed back the paper.  “Oh,” said I, in perfectly good faith, “the mistakes are bad enough, but the writing is far worse.  It really is a disgrace.”  “Oh, my writing!” said the inspector; “I copied the theme out.”  Even after the lapse of twenty years I turn hot all over when I recall the sensations of that moment.

FOOTNOTES: 

[33] 1897.

XXX.

THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS.