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More "Gossip" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it, I thought it!" he cried. "Ye are but cheats after all who, like any common doctor, repeat the gossip that ye have heard, and pretend that it is a message from Heaven. Now why should I not whip you from my town with rods till ye see that red blood which ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... eyes. For the most part I succeeded in believing it, but it is just to add that the neighborhood did not. More than once my mother had angered me by reporting that people talked of my frequent visits to the Cedars, and faint echoes of this gossip had reached my ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... conditions. "Our colonial journalism soon became, in itself, a really important literary force. It could not remain forever a mere disseminator of public gossip, or a placard for the display of advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression. Moreover, each editor was surrounded by a ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... long felt that contempt for popular opinion which every man feels who knows of what miserable materials it is made—how much of it is mere absurdity—how much malice—how much more the frothy foolery and maudlin gossip of the empty of this empty generation. "What was it to me if the grown children of our idle community, the male babblers, and the female cutters-up of character, voted me, in their commonplace souls, the blackest of black sheep? I was still strong in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... to youth as the flower to the sun," and he was brave and noble in his pride and power; and she, gentle and loving, though an Indian woman; so quiet too, and all unlike Wanska, who was the noisiest little gossip ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... old, but time has dealt lightly with him, and he is still hale and hearty. He knows all the gossip of New York for thirty years back, but also knows how to hold his tongue. To see him in his glory, one should wait until the breaking up of some great party. Then he takes his stand on the steps of the mansion, and in ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and sought me for your wife! That is what happened! And—you know this—you are as much or little dishonoured by me, the mother of the living child, as of the dead one. Out upon the honour which is harmed by gossip! What slanderous tongues say of me as a disgrace I deem the highest honour; but if you are of a different opinion, and held it when you wooed me, you would be wiser to prate less loudly of the proud word 'honour,' and we ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... strange that a lady should gossip to this extent with her housemaid, but she did not take much interest in the conversation, being occupied with her own sad thoughts. But the next remark of Geraldine made her start. "Mr. Clancy's father was a carpenter," ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... situation be exhibited as it appeared to the eyes of the world. When the afore-mentioned crisis declared itself, though every one enjoyed the opportunity of exclaiming 'I told you so!' there were few who did not feel really sorry for the Cartwrights, so little of envy mingled with the incessant gossip of which the family were the subject. Mrs. Cartwright was held in more or less affection by every one who knew her. She was a woman of fifty, of substantial frame, florid, and somewhat masculine in manner; a thorough Yorkshire-woman, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... 'you must have more sense. How could you begin about those girls at school?' Lady Myrtle, if she does notice us, won't want to hear all the chatter and gossip of Miss Scarlett's. And it's such a common sort of thing, the moment you hear a name, to start up and say "Oh, I know somebody called that," and then go on about your somebodies that no one wants ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... and after, to rise and write for nearly twelve hours at a stretch, imbibing coffee as a stimulant through these spells of composition. What recreation he took in Paris was at the theatre or at the houses of his noble acquaintances, where he went to gossip of an afternoon. It was exhausting to lead such an existence; and even the transient fillips given by the coffee were paid for in attacks of indigestion and in abscesses which threw him into fits of discouragement. When suffering from these, he poured out ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... suburb will soon enfeeble her, and take the fine edge off her spirit. Left to the sole society of nursemaids and cooks in her own house for many hours a day; to the companionship of women outside her house, whose conversation is mainly gossip about household difficulties; to the tame diversions of shopping at the nearest emporium; what power of interest in the larger things of life can be expected of her? The suburb is her cloister, and she the dedicated ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... soon became the general subject of gossip at head- quarters. Through a feeling of delicacy to M. Foures, the General-in- Chief gave him a mission to the Directory. He embarked at Alexandria, and the ship was captured by the English, who, being informed of the cause of his mission, were malicious ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... went out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great moments; it means companionship in the trivial, too, it means idle hours together, partnership in commonplace things—meals and garden—chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life, ordinary talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conversation about Herods and Roman governors, and the Zealots—custom-house memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbours and home—rumours about the Galileans who were murdered by ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... "Idle Gossip hath her day," Smith slowly said— "Let us plan to carry out the crowning farce, May it serve to charm the haughty Powhatan, As it pleases England's monarch for the time. Yes, the scarlet robe will dazzle Indian chief, An' it is your wish to make of him a clown. ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... a good gossip," said Miss Mapp effusively. "Such an interest she has in other people's affairs. So human and sympathetic. I'm sure our dear hostess told her all about her adventures ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... mind," said Channing, yawning luxuriously. "The sun is bright, the sea is blue, and the confidences of this old palm are soothing. He's a great old gossip, this palm." He looked up into the rustling fronds and smiled. "He whispers me to sleep," he went on, "or he talks me awake—talks about all sorts of things—things he has seen—cyclones, wrecks, and strange ships and Cuban refugees and Spanish spies and lovers that meet here ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... his full meed of pleasure that evening, and the next day, too, for Sir Marmaduke seemed never tired of hearing him recount all the gossip which obtained at Acol and at St. Nicholas: the surmises as to the motive of the horrible crime, the talk about the stranger and his doings, the resentment caused by his weird demise, and the conjectures as to what could ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... become a dissipation. We drink it morning, noon, and night. Some of the old ladies of my acquaintance keep the teapot on the coals pretty much all the time. Our wives meet in the afternoon to sip tea and talk gossip. The girls getting ready to be married invite their mates to quiltings and serve them with Old Hyson. We have garden tea-parties on bright afternoons in summer and evening parties in winter. So much tea, such frequent use of an infusion of the herb, upsets our ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... prevented more; but while explaining to her the causes of her father's displeasure, her mother extracted a good deal more of the gossip, to which ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ago I went to Washington to contradict under the solemn obligation of my oath a gross and wanton calumny which, based upon nothing but anonymous and irresponsible gossip, had been ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn
... big gardens, and young men in flannels and girls in white would stroll about the roads and gay voices would be heard in the dusk. There would be garden-parties, and Mrs. Batty, the wife of the lawyer, would be lavish with tennis for the young, gossip for the middle-aged and unlimited strawberries and ices for all. Rose would be one of the guests at this as at all the parties and, for the first time, as though her refusal of Francis Sales had had some strange effect, as though that rejected future ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the Colonel went on, now fairly launched upon a piece of after-dinner gossip, "that the eastern snake-dance of Madame Esmeralda's people is hereditary even still among the women of the family, and that, sooner or later, it breaks out unexpectedly in every one of them. When the fit comes on, they shut themselves up in their own rooms, I've been told, and twirl round ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... waited for no urging. Here was a chance for a few more moments of gossip. If Miss Flossie wished to take care of the baby, why not permit her to? Her Uncle Harry had given his permission, and as it was his baby, ...
— Dorothy Dainty's Gay Times • Amy Brooks
... such sentiments, cheerily and forcibly expressed, the average gossip and fault-finder is usually willing to acquiesce with a shrug. And so the discussion ends with a feeling that an attempt has been made to exaggerate the importance of a restricted and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... philanthropists, artists, critics, men of letters. It is certainly human to mind your neighbor's business as well as your own. Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale. The art of being human lifts to be a better level than that of gossip; it leaves mere chatter behind, as too reminiscent of a lower stage of existence, and is compassed by those whose outlook is wide enough to serve for guidance and a choosing ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... me that day and bespoke me for a husband, and while the others laughed loudly she had gone out of the room crying. She would have little to say to me then. I began to play with boys and she with girls. And it made me miserable to hear the boys a bit older than I gossip of her beauty and accuse each other of the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... stretched out in the sun not far off, had heard everything, and was sorry that the morrow was to be his last day. He had a good friend, the wolf, and he crept out in the evening into the forest to him, and complained of the fate that awaited him. "Hark ye, gossip," said the wolf, "be of good cheer, I will help you out of your trouble. I have thought of something. To-morrow, early in the morning, your master is going with his wife to make hay, and they will take their little ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... of the front door and there was Master Tanaka, telling the rickshaw-men the latest gossip about us. I said to him, 'Tanaka, are you married?' 'Yes, Lordship,' he answered, 'I am widower.' 'Any children?' I asked again. 'I have two progenies,' he said; 'they are soldiers of His Majesty the Emperor.' 'Why, how old are you?' I asked. 'Forty-three ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... reserved, 'tis hard but one of these old women will get access: and scarce shall you find, as [5210]Austin observes, in a nunnery a maid alone, "if she cannot have egress, before her window you shall have an old woman, or some prating gossip, tell her some tales of this clerk, and that monk, describing or commending some young gentleman or other unto her." "As I was walking in the street" (saith a good fellow in Petronius) "to see the town served one evening, [5211]I spied an old woman in a corner selling of cabbages and roots" (as ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the gossip repeated by Sir Wilfrid Bury, it referred to the latest of Marcia's adventures. Her thoughts played with the matter, especially with certain incidents of the Shrewsbury House ball, as she walked slowly into the drawing-room in her ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this tie is often very strong; but it has no foundation in respect, and is not employed to promote elevation of character. The men sit and smoke their pipes in one apartment, while in another the women cluster upon the floor, and with loud and vociferous voices gossip with their neighbors. The very language of the females is of a lower order than that of the men, which renders it almost impossible for them to comprehend spiritual and abstract subjects, when first presented to their minds. I know not how ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... exposed to the public gaze two or three more or less scandalous episodes of private life, and using them as the foundation of his romance. The fictitious name of Vaudrey has been held to cloak that of such and such a Minister of State. Those, however, who search for vulgar gossip in this book, or who look for private scandal are far astray. They are quite mistaken as regards the tendency and moral of Monsieur Claretie's book. The Vaudrey of the romance is no minister in particular, neither this statesman ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... is about to publish a book called "Memoirs of my Life," which is looked for with great expectations by both the admirers of her genius and the lovers of scandalous gossip. It is certain that if she makes a clean breast of her adventures and experiences, the world will have reason both for admiration and disgust over the confessions: admiration for the generosity of her character—for she never did a mean thing, and probably ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... young woman looked musingly at her. "What a lonely creature you are," she presently said; "never knowing what's going on, or what people are talking about everywhere with keen interest. You should get out, and gossip about as other women do, and then you wouldn't be obliged to ask me a question of that kind. Well, now, I ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... she said cordially; "and I have any number of things to talk over with you. There is no talking for me now, though, with all these people on my hands. Can't you stay on and dine with us? That will give us an hour to gossip comfortably, and Captain Frazer is to be the only other guest. I asked him, on the chance of your appearing. Oh, good ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... happy at Mirfield. I remember well how he used to describe the pleasure of returning to it from a Mission, the silence, the simplicity of the life, the liberty underlying the order and discipline. The tone of the house was admirably friendly and kindly, without gossip, bickering or bitterness, and Hugh found himself among cheerful and sympathetic companions, with the almost childlike mirthfulness which comes of a life, strict, ascetic, united, and free from worldly cares. He spent his first two years in study mainly, and extended ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which, my dear sir, I allude of course to the stronger portion of humanity—has been generally relieved from the imputation of curiosity, or a fondness for gossip. Yet I am constrained to say that hardly had the door closed on Miggles than we crowded together, whispering, snickering, smiling, and exchanging suspicions, surmises, and a thousand speculations in regard to our pretty hostess and her ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... a deeper and more personal significance in this dedication, for some of the stories were begotten in late gossip by your fireside; and furthermore, my little book is given a kind of distinction, in having on its fore-page the name of one well known as a connoisseur of art and a lover ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her presence, without instantly defending the maligned victim, by picturing the possible other side. Her life has been an example, an inspiration in the community, because she has always exerted a kindly, sympathetic, helpful influence. It is this atmosphere, this environment, that checks gossip, stifles scandal, saves heartaches, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... apron hung down over their blue trousers, and as I passed out of their sight, they admired me and gossiped about me, with their hands under their aprons, in much the same manner as their more enlightened sisters of the wash-tub gossip sometimes in the West. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... which was full of people, fell; some were killed, others crippled or maimed, and others bruised. Among them were friars and lay-brothers, negroes and whites. With these events, the common people began to indulge in much gossip. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... years of the Franco-Russian alliance the French archives contain a wealth of documentary material: regular despatches, verbatim reports of conversations between the French ambassadors and the Czar, the news of the day in St. Petersburg and the gossip of society. Savary and Caulaincourt may be said to have kept their master in personal touch with their friend and ally. There is likewise the ordinary regular diplomatic correspondence with Austria, Prussia, Turkey, and the other European states. An interesting and invaluable ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of that. The vile taste for satire and personal gossip will not be eradicated, I suppose, while the elements of curiosity and malice remain in human nature; but as a fashion of literature, I think it is passing away;—at all events it is not my forte. Long experience of what is called "the world," of the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... suspense. Like a wounded bird, she withdrew herself from the light and noisy chatter of her friends, seeking only solitude and crepuscular nooks in which to suffer silently. Jean brought her every picturesque bit of the ghastly gossip, thus heaping coals on the fire of her torture. But she did not grow pale and thin. Not a dimple fled from cheek or chin, not a ray of saucy sweetness vanished from her eyes. Her riant health was unalterable. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Adams would have known that Caroline Barnes and Eleanor Watson had the reputation of being the worst "snobs" in their class, and that Miss Ashby, her neighbor in geometry, boarded with her mother and never went anywhere without her. But Helen knew no college gossip. She offered her invitation to two girls who had been in the dancing-class, read hypocrisy into their hearty regrets that they were going out of town for Sunday, and asked no one else to the play. If she had been less shy and reserved she would have ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... promises," Cried she.—"What now?" says I.—"Farewell, enjoy The girl that you're so taken with!"—I saw Immediately their cause of jealousy: Yet I contain'd myself, nor would disclose My brother's business to a tattling gossip, By whom the knowledge on't might be betray'd. —But what shall I do now? shall I confess The girl to be my brother's; an affair Which should by no means be reveal'd?—But not To dwell on that.—Perhaps they'd not disclose it. Nay, I much doubt if they would credit it: So many ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... known as the Richmond duty, which was levied for many years, for the benefit of one family, but was abolished some time ago. Its origin, and the especial circumstance which, gossip saith, more immediately led to its infliction, are not a little curious, perhaps instructive. The first Duke of Richmond of the present line was a son of Charles II. by Louise Rene de Pennevant de Querouaille, a French lady, better known to us as the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... you are quite a match for the worthy doctor. I think that possibly I can attain our end by some independent explorations of my own. I am afraid that I must leave you to your own devices, as the appearance of TWO inquiring strangers upon a sleepy countryside might excite more gossip than I care for. No doubt you will find some sights to amuse you in this venerable city, and I hope to bring back a more favourable ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her what it was, adding, "I suppose I ought to go and help Fanny, but I can't say I want to. The girls talk about things I have nothing to do with, and I don't find their gossip very amusing. I 'm an outsider, and they only accept me on Fan's account; so I sit in a corner and sew, while they ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... Night-Lightning"—lost his son when Mr. Ross was there taking adhesion to the Treaty, and spread the report that he had brought "bad medicine." Polygamy was practised, and even polyandry was said to exist; but we had no time to verify this gossip, and no right to interfere ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls, whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes, that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole. O hear! The Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord Fleetwood's countess, she professes esteem for the young person. She has been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 1915 having working parties in her house or in the studio; and if she could attract workers gave them such elaborate lunches and plethoric teas that very little work was done, especially as she herself loved a long, aimless gossip about the Royal Family or whether Lord Kitchener had ever really been in love. Or she tried, since she was a poor worker herself—her only jersey and muffler were really finished by her maid—reading aloud ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... away that evening. He was generally away evenings, because most of the neighbors had cozier firesides than his, besides apples, and sometimes cider; and so he passed many a pleasant hour in gossip and farm-talk, while his own little ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... the Spanish Succession. Temple's Memoirs. Coxe's Life of Marlborough. Memoirs of Madame de Maintenon. Madame de Sevigne's Letters. Russell's Modern Europe. The late history by Miss Pardoe is one of the most interesting ever written. It may have too much gossip for what is called the "dignity of history;" but that fault, if fault it be, has been made by Macaulay also, and has been condemned, not unfrequently, by those most incapable of appreciating ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Tom; but, to be plain with you, I do not think that I can be of much use there. I have been several times: she will gossip as long as you please; but if you would talk seriously, she turns a deaf ear. You see, Tom, there's little to be gained when you have to contend with such a besetting sin as avarice. It is so powerful, especially in old age, that it absorbs all other feelings. Still it is my ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Bey, he is absolutely the Good Samaritan, and these Orientals do their kindnesses with such an air of enjoyment to themselves that it seems quite a favour to let them wait upon one. Hekekian comes in every day with his handsome old face and a budget of news, all the gossip of the Sultan and his doings. I shall always fancy the Good Samaritan in a tarboosh with a white beard and very long eyes. I am out of bed to-day for the second time, and waiting for a warm day to go out. Sally saw the illuminations last night; the Turkish bazaar she says was gorgeous. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... had heard of Sary's proneness to gossip and so replied: "We don't consider wealth worth anything unless you know what to do with it. We live as comfortably as we like, and try to use what is left in ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... at first sight. My plan is to marry her and get her farther to the interior, away from the border. It may not be easy. She's watched. So am I. It was impossible to see her without the women of this house knowing. At first, perhaps, they had only curiosity—an itch to gossip. But the last two days there has been a change. Since last night there's some powerful influence at work. Oh, these Mexicans are subtle, mysterious! After all, they are Spaniards. They work in secret, in the dark. They are dominated first by religion, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... an effective book. It occasioned not a little gossip, excitement, scandal, and even heart-burning. Though the author announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters, not to be taken as likenesses of real persons, and though no doubt there were scenes and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, of even history, which is only biography on a larger scale? Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be "philosophy teaching by example," is, after all, but a gossip who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a teacup instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia? In what gutters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... need labouring? Have we not abundant instances about us of the vulgar tittle-tattle and scandalous unfounded gossip which, born Heaven alone knows on what back-stairs or in what servants' hall, circulates currently to the detriment of the distinguished in every walk of life? And the more conspicuously great the individual, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... absolute beauty) was Odette—Odette in her activities, her environment, her projects, and her past. At every other period in his life, the little everyday words and actions of another person had always seemed wholly valueless to Swann; if gossip about such things were repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his mind that was interested; at such moments he felt utterly dull and uninspired. But in ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... individual man or woman reads at his fireside has no socializing influence, but the play which they see together is naturally discussed, views are exchanged, and all which in old-fashioned times was avoided, even in serious discussion, becomes daily more a matter of the most superficial gossip. When recently at a dinner party a charming young woman whom I had hardly met before asked me, when we were at the oysters, how prostitution is regulated in Germany, and did not conclude the subject before we had reached the ice cream, I saw the natural consequences ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... thoughts, profound speculations, matters of experience, bits of observation, delicate fancies, romantic sentiments, humorous criticisms on people and things, funny stories, dreams of the future, memories of the past, pictures of the present, the merest gossip, the veriest trifling, everything, nothing, may form the theme, if naturally spoken of, not hunted up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... previously Edwin and Maggie had seen their father considerably agitated by an item of gossip, casually received, to which it seemed to them he attached an excessive importance. Namely, that old Shushions, having been found straying and destitute by the authorities appointed to deal with such matters, had been taken to the workhouse and was dying there. Darius had heard ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... as she had explained to the officers, that she was alone on the premises—her mistress had been called away upon sudden business—but if they would take the ups with the downs. . . . Then, her curiosity overcoming her—for, of course, she had heard gossip of the doctor's intentions—"And which of you," she asked, "is he going to ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perpetuates itself without any premiums or encouragement, producing a number of excellent souls in whom secrecy is natural and incorruptible. From the origin of the Parlement to the present day, no case has ever been known at the Palais de Justice of any gossip or indiscretion on the part of a clerk bound to the Courts of Inquiry. Gentil sold the release given by Louise de Savoie to Semblancay; a War Office clerk sold the plan of the Russian campaign to Czernitchef; and these traitors were more or less rich. The prospect of a post ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... prejudices, are millionfold, but not less numerous are the channels for antisocial and antihygienic suggestions. No one can measure the injury done to the psychophysical balance of the weaker brains, for instance, by the sensational court gossip and reports of murder trials in the newspapers for the masses. But while the influence of suggestion is on the whole familiar to public opinion, the community is much less aware of another factor which we found ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... was President, a member of the regiment, Major Llewellyn, who was Federal District Attorney under me in New Mexico, wrote me a letter filled, as his letters usually were, with bits of interesting gossip about the comrades. It ran in part as follows: "Since I last wrote you Comrade Ritchie has killed a man in Colorado. I understand that the comrade was playing a poker game, and the man sat into the game and used such language that Comrade Ritchie had to shoot. Comrade Webb has killed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... spreading it all around the country? But I guess you won't as long as it would make you out a fool too. I'll not have Mary's name dragged about in a lot of gossip." ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... heir had gone West, and as the summer wore on, the gossip died down. Other and more absorbing gossip took its place: never distinctly formulated, but whispered; always wishing for more definite news that never came. The statesmen drove out from Brampton to the door of the tannery ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... asked him to return a book he had borrowed, and added, by the way, in a postscript, the very "amusing" piece of news that his old flame Mariana was in love with the tutor Nejdanov and he with her. This was not merely gossip, but she, Valentina Mihailovna, had seen with her own eyes and heard with her own ears. Markelov's face grew blacker than night, but he did not utter a word. He ordered the book to be returned, and when he caught sight of Nejdanov coming downstairs, greeted him just ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... there in the rare absences of the manager. Sometimes Nick spent the night there when forced to work overtime. His home life, at best, was a sketchy affair. Here chauffeurs, mechanics, washers lolled at ease exchanging soft-spoken gossip, motor chat, speculation, comment, and occasional verbal obscenity. Each possessed a formidable knowledge of that neighbourhood section of Chicago known as Hyde Park. This knowledge was not confined to car costs and such ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... press, I was unaware that they were all being taken down wrong. For the same reason (incredible as it must appear in an American) I never entertained the least suspicion that they were destined to be dished up with a sauce of penny-a-lining gossip; and myself, my person, and my works of art, butchered to make a holiday for the readers of a Sunday paper. Night had fallen over the Genius of Muskegon before the issue of my theoretic eloquence was stayed, nor did I separate from my new friend without ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an immense volume of noise and dust enveloped the main street of Sainte Lesse, stilling the quiet noon gossip of the town, silencing the birds, awing the town dogs so that their impending barking died to amazed gurgles drowned in the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... them we feel as though we had been on familiar terms with that wicked, corrupt, outwardly delightful society that gambled and drank, and scandalised the grave spirits of the nation, in the days when George III. was young. Horace Walpole was the letter-writer of letter-writers; his gossip carries the impress of truth with it; and, though he had no style, no brilliancy, no very superior ability, yet, by using his faculties in a natural way, he was able to supply material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. I take it ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... on to question me where I had been, what I had done, what I made of things. He'd never, he said, forgotten our two days' gossip in the Levant, and all the wide questions about the world and ourselves that we had broached then and left so open. I soon found myself talking very freely to him. I am not a ready or abundant talker, but Gidding has the knack of precipitating ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... that we should make our way separately to our rendezvous, which was to be the first mile-stone upon the Paris road. In this way we should avoid the gossip which might get about if three men who were so well known were to be seen riding out together. My little Violette had cast a shoe that morning, and the farrier was at work upon her when I returned, ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some witty reply, and we settled to a pleasant chat about mutual acquaintances, about books, pictures, music, and the gossip of our set. I would cheerfully have discussed Herbert Spencer's system, the Assyrian Tablets, or any other dry subject with Miss Mayton, and felt that I was richly repaid by the pleasure of seeing her. Handsome, intelligent, ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... He bought the tract, named it, inhabited several years, a popular squire-arch, and then returned from the wild to the tame, from pine woods and stumpy fields to the elm-planted hedge-rows and shaven lawns of placid England. The local gossip did not reveal any cause for Mr. Rangeley's fondness for contrasts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... his spirit was in no mood for idle gossip; no, it was full of gnawing anxiety and tender fears, and his heart bled when he reflected that he had broken his vows, and forsworn the oath he had made to his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was managed gracefully, and with due deference to the amenities. There was gossip, of course—there always is gossip—and public opinion was many sided. Rumors circled around which played the whole gamut from infidelity to bankruptcy; these lived their brief span, and then gave place to other rumors, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... the dripping roofs and sunk snow-barrows The bells are ringing loud and strangely near, The shout of children dins upon mine ear Shrilly, and like a flight of silvery arrows Showers the sweet gossip of the British sparrows, Gathered in noisy knots of one or two, To joke and chatter just as mortals do Over the days long tale of joys ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... "Oh, not much—to gossip about. However, she's tired to death now, and not at all well, and that's what makes her so restless. She dropped off into a nap about an hour ago, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... changed. There he was in his own room littered with papers and books. All about the familiar sounds. In the street the trumpet sounding the close of the warning against air-bombs. On the house stairs the reassured gossip of the tenants coming up from the cellar. In the story overhead the crazy marching to and fro of the old neighbor who for months had been waiting for his ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... and handsome as a lady, had the reputation of being a scornful person, very hard on lovers. And from that, added to the trifle of the two slaps, of the presumptuousness of Delphin, and of the wrath of Margot, one ought easily to comprehend the endless gossip ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola
... bright letter of New York gossip published in the New York Star, called "Bab's Babble." Edward had read it, and saw the possibility of syndicating this item as a woman's letter from New York. He instinctively realized that women all over the country would ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... Millar were cousins, and had once been the closest of friends, but that was years ago, before some spiteful reports and ill-natured gossip had come between them, making only a little rift at first that soon widened into a chasm of coldness and alienation. Therefore this invitation surprised ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of a cheery, expansive disposition, and not much of the village gossip ever escaped him or remained ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... book we should not see his significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred those parts of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... these anecdotes occasioned, the Judge came in: delighted with the merriment, and delighted with his wife, he seated himself beside her, quite covetous of an hour's gossip with the ladies. Mrs. Gunilla served him up the human soul in the Orbis Pictus, and Elise instigated her still further to the relation of the purification of the boys. The Judge laughed at both from the bottom of his heart, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Deanery. But when she got to her father's house, where she was for the present staying, she in truth startled them all by the news. The Dean had just come into the drawing-room to have his afternoon tea and a little gossip with his wife and his own sister, Mrs. Forrester, from London. "Who do you think is going to be married, and to whom?" said Mrs. Thorne. "I'll give you all three guesses apiece, and bet you a pair of gloves all round that you ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... private mad-house. It was not quite so private as it might have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London without troubling himself to solve mysteries ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Sasa's pretty head—one of those brilliant, clever, feminine ideas—that seemed to us, in that triumphant moment, to be the means of untangling all our difficulties. Though it was eight o'clock, and there was the risk of gossip in my driving Sasa French alone about the Municipality at such an hour, I put her into my buggy, whipped up my horse, and set a straight course for Seumanutafa, the high chief of Apia. He laughed a good deal, demurred somewhat, and was finally persuaded to squeeze his ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... the city gates, and all day gangs of workers journeyed back and forth to bring in supplies. They were hurrying, bustling, busy, but in good order and at perfect understanding with each other. If one stopped to exchange greetings with an acquaintance, to hear a bit of gossip perhaps, or to tell the latest news, he would pick up his load in a great hurry and start off at a round trot, as though he meant to make up for lost time. More than one overburdened worker was eased of a part of ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... objection to soil their hands with work that the men had to dirty theirs with commerce. The labors of the loom, which no Grecian princess regarded as unbecoming her rank, were despised by all Persian women except the lowest; and we may conclude that the same idle and frivolous gossip which resounds all day in the harems of modern Iran formed the main occupation of the Persian ladies in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... the Chateau des Noires-Fontaines and keep on the watch, but could he trust the servants? Michel and Jacques would hold their tongues, Roland was sure of them; but Charlotte, the jailer's daughter, she might gossip. However, it was three o'clock in the morning, every one was asleep, and the safest plan was certainly to put himself in communication with Michel. Michel would find some way of concealing ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... same human wants as themselves. Ladles who yawn in their elegantly furnished parlors, among books and pictures, if they have not company, parties, or opera to diversify the evening, seem astonished and half indignant that cook and chambermaid are more disposed to go out for an evening gossip than to sit on hard chairs in the kitchen where they have been toiling all day. The pretty chambermaid's anxieties about her dress, the minutes she spends at her small and not very clear mirror, are sneeringly noticed by those whose toilet-cares ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... with himself is, in view of the solution of the dramatic situation, utterly impossible. Indeed, it would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that his care to identify himself with Aminta's confidant may have been an unusual but not untimely piece of caution on his part, to prevent poisoned gossip connecting him too ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... astonished that I knew anything about it, but remember, every Pole in London knows all about his fellow-countrymen, and so it is very natural that I know something of Richard Gessner. You who live in his house can tell me more. See what a gossip I am where my own people are concerned. You have been living in this man's house and you can tell me all about it—his tastes, his books, his friends. There would be many friends coming, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Here's a dollar says the lady is too particular." The high-bosomed matron confided her fears for the happiness of the girl, "who has been real kind to Johnnie," to the spinster who had admired Stefan the first day out. Gossip was universal, but through it all the two moved radiant ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... to gossip and idle tales and foolish conversation and things of that sort, we ought to let such go "in at one ear and out at the other"; we should be very careful that they find no lodging-place in our hearts. That is the only safe way for our souls. But too often ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... this invaluable asset to a new country I do not know, but it was a factor. We were a people dependent upon one another. Ours was a land without established social law or custom. It was impossible to regulate one's life or habits by any set rule; and there was no time or energy for idle gossip or criticism. Each one had all he could do to manage ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... repeated in their turn to strangers, to amuse and gain a few pence. We pass over any details of the persecution inflicted on him by English tourists, who, not actuated by sympathy, but out of sheer curiosity and eagerness to pick up all the gossip and idle tales in circulation, were wont to run after Lord Byron, intruding on his private walks, and even pressing into his very palace. Such conduct, of course, displeased him, and accordingly in the summer of 1818 we find traces of ill-humor visible in his correspondence, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... insolence of it. She knew her eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart. This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed muster for courtly wit. Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... because she enjoyed it, partly because of the treats they derived from it. The Guild was called by some hostile husbands, who found their wives getting too independent, the "clat-fart" shop—that is, the gossip-shop. It is true, from off the basis of the Guild, the women could look at their homes, at the conditions of their own lives, and find fault. So the colliers found their women had a new standard of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... good deal of gossip, but very little of it, indeed, seemed to me at the time to be of importance. Dropping in at the St. Francis Club, where I had some friends, I casually mentioned the troubles of the Huntington Closes. I was surprised ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... constantly attracted to the Williamses by prominent newspaper allusions to their prosperity and growing fashionable prestige. What they did and where they went were chronicled in the then new style journalistic social gossip, and the every-day world was made familiar with his financial opinions and his equipages and her toilettes. The meeting in the street was an ordeal for Selma. Flossy had been shopping and was about to step into her carriage, the door of which was held ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... there are always a few who gossip in spite of repeated warnings from the authorities. Sometimes it is a young nurse, sometimes a masseuse, a manicure or a shampooer, but there are always those who retail the news, mostly innocent news, of an institution like this. Cold-packing, or rubbing, or spraying, or ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ears are greeted by the resounding clash of scissors. Entering upon the field of action, our eyes are dazzled by a thousand fragments of rich and brilliant hues, and our personal safety endangered by swiftly flying needles and unsuspected pins. Gossip is at an end, for the thread must be continually bitten off. Dancing is child's play, a folly of the past. The piano is converted into a table, or an ironing-board. No games can be suggested but Thread-my-needle, ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... found out that the strangers were more interested about the natural features of Deerbrook than about its gossip. He was amused at the earnestness of Margaret's inquiries about the scenery of the neighbourhood, and he laughingly promised that she should see every nook within ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... people," he said. "I believe you are never more happy than when fighting. Those men of yours look more like a parcel of schoolboys preparing for a holiday than men making ready for a desperate life-and-death struggle. But I must be brief; there is no time for anything like gossip now; the pirate schooner is within two miles of us, and Don Felix expects her to open fire immediately. I have tried to persuade him that he was hasty and ill- advised to refuse your offer of assistance; but the fellow is as obstinate as a pig; he will ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... her gossip so lightly and rapidly that this last piece of information had not given him the start its significance deserved. But ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... of Colonel Potts, printed elsewhere in this issue, is a sufficient refutation of the malicious gossip that has been handed back and forth lately that he had planned to leave Little Arcady. It looks now like certain busybodies in this community had over-stepped themselves and been hoisted up by their ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... would lose his money. Joe Mixet was probably right; but there had been a want of prudence, a lack of worldly sagacity, in the way in which Crumb had allowed his proposed marriage with Ruby Ruggles to become a source of gossip to all Bungay. His love was now an old affair; and, though he never talked much, whenever he did talk, he talked about that. He was proud of Ruby's beauty, and of her fortune, and of his own status as her acknowledged lover,—and he did not hide his light under a bushel. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... been a successful strike made that afternoon, and the men were all excited and eager about it. Every one pressed to the "Pistol Shot" to hear the latest details, to discuss and gossip over it. There was as much talk as digging done in Dawson. Men who had no chance and no means to win success, who owned no claims and never saw gold except in another man's hands, loved to talk work and talk claims and talk gold with the rest. It was exhilarating and ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... original purpose was temple, astronomical observatory, or both is one of the riddles of antiquarian research, for neolithic man left no record of his doings beyond the weapons buried with him in his barrow. Legend, however, like a busy gossip, had stepped in and supplied points upon which history was silent. Traditions of the neighborhood explained the menhirs as twelve giants turned into stone by the magic powers of good King Arthur, who, in defiance of the claims of the isle of Avalon, was supposed to be buried in a hitherto ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... should have thought you were too sensible to listen to servant's gossip," said Mr. Gresley, impatiently. "Your own common-sense will tell you that Hester never performed that journey on foot. I told Dr. Brown the same, but he lost his temper at once. It's curious how patient he is in a sick-room, and how furious he can be out of it. He was very angry with me, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... miscellaneous works include The Savages of Europe (London, 1764), a satire on the English which he translated from the French, and Anccdotes Ancient and Modern (London, 1789) a.n amusing collection of gossip. His chief work was a History of Great Britain connected with the Chronology of Europe from Caesar's Invasion to Accession of Edward VI., in 2 vols. (London, 1794-1795) . Its plan is somewhat singular, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... gardens of Adonis are still planted in connexion with the great midsummer festival which bears the name of St. John. At the end of March or on the first of April a young man of the village presents himself to a girl, and asks her to be his comare (gossip or sweetheart), offering to be her compare. The invitation is considered as an honour by the girl's family, and is gladly accepted. At the end of May the girl makes a pot of the bark of the cork-tree, fills it with earth, and sows a handful of wheat and barley in it. The pot being placed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of what went on except from the gossip of the rest. My place was in the kitchen, and I had too much to do that day to be loitering round in the halls, leaning on a broom-handle, and listening at keyholes," and she cast a glance of scathing contempt in the direction ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... through a furnace? Did she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... and deep, And here and there men stood to reap, One morn I put my heart to sleep, And to the lanes I took my way. The goldfinch on a thistle-head Stood scattering seedlets while she fed; The wrens their pretty gossip spread, Or joined a ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... part of it on the cool piazza, for he was now able to move about on crutches very well. He had no lack of company, but all found him reticent concerning his accident and the causes which had led to it. The most persistent gossip in the house learned no more than the bare facts, and was inclined to believe there was nothing more to learn. That Stanton was so distant was explained by the fact that he was an unsuccessful rival. Both Van Berg and Ida puzzled Stanton as far as he gave them thought, but in his honest loyalty his ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... loves a good gossip," said Miss Mapp effusively. "Such an interest she has in other people's affairs. So human and sympathetic. I'm sure our dear hostess told her all about her adventures at ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... leave these two for a while, and follow the peasant, who walked on quickly without stopping, in order to get the sooner to the Gckerli hill, and on his way he met his gossip. His gossip was an egg-merchant, and was just coming from the market, where he had sold his eggs. "May you be blessed," said the gossip, "where are ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... "Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch"—"What we are now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"—there is an answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a piece of money. Secret sin was eating away Belgium's vitality—the sin of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits of service, amiable passages destroying nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Albert has cleared his people from a ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... "They are quite clean, civil people. They have a naughty, queer, little crippled boy, but I suppose they can't keep him in order because he is an invalid. He's rather rude, I'm sorry to say, but he's rather sharp and clever, too. He seems to lie on his sofa and collect all the gossip ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Her statesmen seemed bemused with the intoxication of Bulgarian military victories, and unable to forget the glowing calculations of the future Bulgarian Empire which they had made during the course of the war. Those calculations I gathered from gossip with all classes in Bulgaria at different times, speaking not only with politicians but with bankers, trading people, and others. They concluded that the Turk was going to be driven out of Europe, at any rate, as far as Constantinople. They considered that Constantinople ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... bruised. All suggestions that Hallie had innocently let fall put such an ugly face upon his actions. I didn't want to believe that hateful gossip. His smile had been so charming and kind. There was something about him that made him seem of so much greater importance than any one else I had known; that made every little look and motion of his memorable and eloquent. And when he had ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... drastic proof of my good faith. I was to be hauled out of bed, and hurried without warning to look at the biplane in her hangar. The mechanics were to be sent outside, there to wait for a signal to open the doors: this to avoid gossip if I was honest after all. Hupfer was to spring it on me that he'd decided to take me up instead of Herter. My face was to be watched as this news was flung at me. If I showed the slightest trace of uneasiness, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that came to his ears couched in ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... given weight by rumor. A breath of gossip in a thieves market. A scrawled word on smudged paper. A blank folder in Terran Intelligence. Another puzzle-piece ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... with this wonderment that she gave no heed to the talk about Larry's experience in Sing Sing and Old Jimmie's recital of what had happened among Larry's friends during his absence. During this gossip the Duchess entered from the stairway, and without word to any one shuffled across to her desk in a corner and bent silently over her accounts: just one more grotesque and unredeemed pledge in this museum of antiquities ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... most advisedly, for in very truth the American historian is a rara avis. Of American compilers-of-facts, to be sure, there have been and are very many, but an aggregation of details is not a history, nor can a man who makes a book out of local gossip and the biographies of local heroes and heroines be called an historian. The truth of this fact has been most forcibly impressed on the writer in the course of preparing for the Census Bureau historical sketches of many ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the morning. There is the dim funereal ivy, there is the brightness and glow of the purple convolvulus, there is the wild-rose clustering round the windows. They are lying asleep on the doorsteps, they gather themselves into knots as if to gossip and to talk in the language of flowers by the doorways—utterly beautiful! You look at the city with wonder and astonishment—with desire. How wonderful, you say, that church tower covered with its flowers; ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... instead of displaying it." "In an age wholly depraved, she approached the ideal woman of modern times; in spite of her virtue, she was brilliant and honored, the centre of a coterie that delighted in music, verse, ingenious dialogues and gossip, story telling, singing, rhyming. Deeply afflicted by the sad and odious spectacle of the vices, abuses, and crimes which unroll before her, she suffers through her imagination, mind and heart." Serious and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... spot; and Miss Tox found herself so much at home already, that without delay she instituted a preliminary examination of the children all round—which Mr Toodle much admired—and booked their ages, names, and acquirements, on a piece of paper. This ceremony, and a little attendant gossip, prolonged the time until after their usual hour of going to bed, and detained Miss Tox at the Toodle fireside until it was too late for her to walk home alone. The gallant Grinder, however, being still there, politely offered to attend her to her own door; and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and common-sense holds that what is strange cannot be true. Yet something strange had undeniably occurred. It was very strange if Elizabeth on the night of January 1, retired to become a mother, of which there was no appearance, while of an amour even gossip could not furnish a hint. It was very strange if, having thus retired, she was robbed, starved, stripped and brought to death's door, bleeding and broken down. It was very strange that no vestige of evidence as to her real place of concealment could ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Zack out, and do up the door. Bless your heart! it's no trouble to me. I'm always moving about at home from morning to night, to prevent myself getting fatter. Don't say no, Mr. Blyth, unless you are afraid of trusting an old gossip like ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... and by-and-bye, looking down from a corridor, they saw Mrs. Archbold driving the second-class women before her to dinner like a flock of animals. Whenever one stopped to look at anything, or try and gossip, the philanthropic Archbold went at her just like a shepherd's dog at a refractory sheep, caught her by the shoulders, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... about Rangoon is not likely to be missed. The tale itself is a good-humoured little comedy of European and native intrigue, showing how one section of the populace strove as usual to ease the white man's burden by flirtation and gossip, and the other to get the best for themselves by unlimited roguery and chicane. The whole thing culminates in a trial scene which is at once a delightful entertainment and (I should suppose) a shrewdly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... quickly grasps the situation. First ignored, then made the subject of evil gossip, the temple clash, and now His closest friend subjected to violence, His own rejection is painfully evident. He makes a number of radical changes. His place of activity is changed to a neighboring province under different civil rule; His method, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the burden of her years, and an aged person's need of tranquillity, could never endure the constant noise and movement of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in the house would cause idle gossip and set the whole street agog: people would say she was her child. Germinie made a confidante of her mistress. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that she had taken charge of her niece, although she had pretended not to know it; ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... do when you are dead? You have to go into a world where there are no gossip and no housekeeping; no mills and no offices; no shops, no books; no colleges and no sciences to learn. What will you do there? 'He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' If you have done your housekeeping, and your weaving and spinning, and your book-keeping, and your ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... liked to be quiet and think matters over. He only came to see Yourii because, at home, by himself, he was sad and worried. Lida's refusal still distressed him, and he could not be sure if he felt grieved or humiliated. As a straightforward, indolent fellow, he had so far heard nothing of the local gossip concerning Lida and Sarudine. He was not jealous, but only sorrowful that the dream which brought happiness so near ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... of Bruges, whom he had distinguished by his attentions, was ridiculed for her red hair by a few merry courtiers, whereupon Philip declared that her tresses should be immortally honoured in the golden emblem of a new society.[2] But that may be set down as gossip. Philip's own assertion, when he instituted the Order of the Golden Fleece, was that he ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... too much your mother's daughter for that!" Vanderbank leaned back and smoked, and though all his air seemed to say that when one was so at ease for gossip almost any subject would do, he kept jogging his foot with the same small nervous motion as during the half-hour at Mertle that this record has commemorated. "You're too much one of us all," he continued. "We've tremendous perceptions," he laughed. "Of ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... recognised him. He had arrived the night before, and taken a room at the Pack-horse, nobody asking his name; had sat after supper in a corner of the smoking-room and listened to the gossip there, saying nothing. ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... when news of the Auld Laird's death reached the village, and on the following Sabbath there was not an empty seat in the kirk, for every one was anxious to hear the latest gossip about the event which meant so much to every one in the region. There was no newspaper in the village, and the news of the week was passed about by word of mouth in the kirkyard after service, or on week days ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... to dinner, and stayed through the evening. The more I saw of him, the more certain I felt that he had some private end to serve in coming to Brighton. I watched him carefully. He maintained the same appearance of ease, and talked the same godless gossip, hour after hour, until it was time to take leave. As he shook hands with Rachel, I caught his hard and cunning eyes resting on her for a moment with a peculiar interest and attention. She was plainly concerned in the object that he had in view. ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... recounted to each other, one of the adventures of his journey, the other the gossip of the camp, stories of gallantry, and the rest. But Maille's first question was touching Marie d'Annebaut, whom Lavalliere swore to be intact in that precious place where the honour of husbands is lodged; at which the amorous ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... soldiers. When Mr. Cornell was asked to contribute to their funds, he declined, to the great surprise of those who asked him, and said dryly: "Of course these women don't really come together to sew for the soldiers; they come together to gossip.'' This was said, no doubt, with that peculiar twinkle of the eye which his old friends can well remember; but, on the young ladies protesting that he did them injustice, he answered: "If you can prove that I am wrong, I will ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... gather round him at the board, and they tell him all the gossip of the neighborhood. He does not talk about the war, and, if they are curious—probably they are not!—they do not ask him questions. They think that he wants to forget about the war and the trenches ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... did not hear from him at all, and gossip was rife in New Salem. His letters became more formal and less frequent and finally ceased altogether. The girl's proud spirit compelled her to hold her head high amid the impertinent ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... idle gossip, I assure you," was the reply, as the tones sank into a whisper. "I have the best evidence in the world as ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... live there are the progeny of people who have lived there for many generations, and it is the very place to nurse, and preserve, and care for old legends and traditions of bygone times, until they grow from bits of gossip and news into local history of considerable size. As in the busier world men talk of last year's elections, here these old bits, and scraps, and odds and ends of history are retailed to the listener who cares to listen—traditions ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... had to dirty theirs with commerce. The labors of the loom, which no Grecian princess regarded as unbecoming her rank, were despised by all Persian women except the lowest; and we may conclude that the same idle and frivolous gossip which resounds all day in the harems of modern Iran formed the main occupation of the Persian ladies in the time of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... son, especially as the pale, melancholy lad bore on his face no signs of dissipation. These disappearances lasted for over a year. Racah was chided by his mother, a large, chicken-minded woman, who liked gossip and chocolate. He never answered her, and on Sundays locked himself in his room. Once his sister listened at the door and told her father that she heard her brother counting aloud and clicking on the table with some soft, dull-edged tool, a tiny ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... intelligence of the coming and going of social leaders, of their dinners and lunches and teas, of their receptions and balls, and the guests who were bidden to them. But this sort of unwholesome and exciting gossip, which was formerly devoured by their readers with inappeasable voracity, is no longer supplied, simply because the taste for it has wholly ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... had existed one hundred and ten years, when it was merged, in 1874, by purchase of the copyright, into the Morning Chronicle, in its early days, was nearly the sole exponent of the wants— of the gossip (in prose and in verse)—and of the daily events of Quebec. As such, though, from the standard of to-day, it may seem quaint and puny, still it does not appear an untruthful mirror of social life in the ancient capital. Its centenary number of June, 1864, with the fyles of the Gazette ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... distance up Little River; then disembarking at the Hecklefield Landing, where the hospitable host of the occasion was doubtless waiting to receive the travelers, they made their way with many a friendly interchange of gossip and jest to the great house, standing back from the river beneath the arching branches of ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... certainly claim originality in that her working hours were never broken by social interruptions. She was unamiable, but had no love for slander, though she was herself the object of much spiteful gossip from women who passed as wits in the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... among their neighbours and very much the reverse when they are out of sight; and he also knew there's a sort very frank and honest to their fellow men, but very much the reverse to their fellow women. So he just took stock and had speech with Richard off and on and heard the gossip and ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... are coming out of the chapel, followed by a crowd of women, who divide at the gate and troop off in different directions, while the men linger on the road to gossip. ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... in bed," he said. "They always have a good long gossip; and, as long as they are down in good time I don't like to be too strict. But, my dear Lee. You don't ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... were many other establishments devoted, more especially in the latest period of Venetian independence, to the requirements of those who desired such resorts for purposes of conversation and gossip. These houses were frequented by various classes of patrons—the patrician, the politician, the soldier, the artist, the old and the young—all had their special haunts where the company and the tariff were in accordance with the guests. The upper circles of male society—all ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... sword, My words are true, and I came here to say them, To thee, my son in all but blood. Mass, I'm no gossip. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... of an old man in whose heart was a tinge of bitterness. Yet the thought is often lofty and the comment clear and full of flashing insight. It is the book of Ecclesiastes over again, written in a minor key, with a little harmless gossip added for filling. Meissonier died in Paris on the Twenty-first of January, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-one, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... and observed, as in the nature of pleasant gossip, that Don Anastasio had quite an unusual outfit ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... spoke," I assured her. "And, by the way, if you haven't heard the latest gossip it may interest you to hear that the young rascal has formed an attachment, and is very proud of her fiancee. She is an awfully pretty girl and quite athletic as well—in fact, his arm is not nearly so small as Johnny's isn't, and his carriage is perfect. Their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... half a mile from Lucketts' Place; on the Overboro' road, which passed it, was a pleasant roadside inn, where, under the sign of The Sun, very good ale was sold. Most of the farmers dropped in there now and then, not so much for a glass as a gossip, and no one from the neighbouring villages or from Overboro' town ever drove past without stopping. In the 'tap' of an evening you might see the labourers playing at 'chuck-board,' which consists in casting a small square piece of lead ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... wound sorely and slyly when the season is come. Such are they like, the leasing men, those who with tongue give assurance of troth with fair-spoken words, false in their thought; then do they at length shrewdly betray: in profession they have the perfume of honey, smooth gossip so sweet; and in their souls purpose, with devilish craft, a stab ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... up to town to read the newspapers at the St. James's Coffee-house, found their columns filled with extracts from the fortunate effusion of the hour, conjectures as to its writer, and much gossip respecting Wolcot and Hayley. He returned to Enfield laden with the journals, and, presenting them to his parents, broke to them the intelligence, that at length he was not only an author, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... we knew before, Zara, that they'd come for him and taken him to the city. But Wanaka said she was sure that it is only gossip, and that he needn't be afraid. And we're going to the city, too, you know, so you'll be able ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... almost unawares to herself, for his passing; and she was not ashamed at the discovery. It was a sort of melancholy comfort to her that there was a great gulf fixed between them. His station, his acquirements, his great connections and friends in London (for all Tom's matters were the gossip of the town, as, indeed, he took care that they should be), made it impossible that he should ever think of her; and therefore she held herself excused for thinking of him, without any fear of that "self-seeking," and "inordinate affection," and "unsanctified passions," which ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... work together, and rattled on in a free, wild, racy talk, with an edge of satire for whoever came near, a fantastic excess in its drollery, and just a touch of native melancholy tingeing it. The last queer guest, some neighborhood gossip, some youthful folly or pretentiousness of Kitty's, some trait of their own, some absurdity of the boys if they happened to be at home, and came lounging in, were the themes out of which they contrived such jollity as never was, save ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... before in some trouble for it. With him to Westminster Hall, where I walked till noon talking with one or other, and so to the Wardrobe to dinner, where tired with Mr. Pickering's company I returned to Westminster, by appointment, to meet my wife at Mrs. Hunt's to gossip with her, which we did alone, and were very merry, and did give her a cup and spoon for my wife's god-child, and so home by coach, and I late reading in my chamber and then to bed, my wife being angry that I keep the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... has transpired within his personal recollection at the National Metropolis, he has gathered what "waifs" he has found floating on the sea of chat, in the whirlpools of gossip, or in the quiet havens of conversation. Some of these may be personal —piquantly personal, perhaps—but the mighty public has had an appetite for gossipings about prominent men and measures ever since the time ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... thereat and Moggy, encouraged by hearing the voices of Betty and the vender of splendours at the little parlour window, and also by the amber sunlight on the rustling ivy leaves, and the loud evening gossip of the sparrows, took heart of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... madam:—some tattling gossip or designing knave, has whispered some falsehood to ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... possessing its well, its green paddock, and its own overshadowing tree or trees. They were quaintly built, with timbered fronts, and great projecting porches where the inhabitants gathered at the close of the day, to discuss the news and to gossip over local or ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... wonder, perhaps, why your sickness is not healed, your spirit filled with the joy of the Holy Ghost, or your life blessed and prosperous. It may be that some dart which you have flung with angry voice, or in an idle hour of thoughtless gossip, is pursuing you on its way, as it describes the circle which always bring back to the source from which it came every shaft of bitterness, and every idle ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... little more kindly, declaring that Mary's discovery of an unconsciously nurtured passion for a married man, and her determination to flee temptation, were the cause of her leaving England. That there was during her life-time some idle gossip about her relations to Fuseli is shown in the references to it in Eliza's ill-natured letter. This counts for little, however. It was simply impossible for the woman who had written in defiance of social laws and ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... and moody demeanor at the marriage of his mother told terribly against him, and the rumors of the previous quarrel when Ned had assaulted his stepfather, and which, related with many exaggerations, had at the time furnished a subject of gossip in the town, also ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... believer in the fasting treatment. She was apparently a victim of this strange and heretical therapeutical faith. Kensington is buzzing with gossip concerning the deplorable death of the unfortunate woman. C. F. Meyer, the husband of the victim, accepts the death of his wife as due to heart-failure, and apparently ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... and I sat down at her feet, and took her hands, her little hands, that were so marked with the needle, and that moved me. I said to myself: 'These are the sacred marks of toil.' Oh! Monsieur, do you know what those sacred marks of labor mean? They mean all the gossip of the workroom, the whispered blackguardism, the mind soiled by all the filth that is talked; they mean lost chastity, foolish chatter, all the wretchedness of daily bad habits, all the narrowness of ideas which belongs to women of the lower orders, united in the girl ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... cold day in London, city of sad cold days, a man in a Club had nothing on earth to do. He had glanced through the morning papers and found them full of adjectives and empty of news. He had smoked several cigarettes. He had exchanged a word or two of gossip with two or three acquaintances. And he had stared moodily out of a bow window, and had been rewarded by a vision of wet paving stones, wet beggars and wet sparrows. He felt depressed and inclined to wonder why he existed. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and Sarah Swetnam had exhausted the Brunt hat, and were spaciously at sea in an enchanted ocean of miscellaneous gossip such as is only possible between two highly-educated women who scorn tittle-tattle. Helen had the back bedroom; partly because the front bedroom was her uncle's, but partly also because the back bedroom was just as large as and much quieter ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... with a smile, she sat down familiarly on his desk, and they plunged into a vein of social gossip. ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... disagreeable cannot expect to command a large audience. Mrs. Mangan, on the contrary, was neither the one nor the other, being, at this time, but little over forty, and as kindly, lazy, and handsome a creature as ever lived down spiteful gossip by good-nature. When "The Dawkthor" (as she called him, with a drowsy drag on the first syllable) had galloped in at one o'clock to command Barty's room to be got ready at once, Mrs. Mangan was still in what she called "dishable," ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... been sounded with blessings in poor men's huts long before it got within the gates of Herod's palace. That is the place where religious earnestness makes its mark last of all. But it finally ran thither also; and light gossip went round concerning this new sensation. 'Who is He? Who is He?' Each man had his own theory about Him, but a sudden memory started up in the frivolous despot's soul, and it was with a trembling heart that he said to himself, 'I know! I know! It is John, whom I beheaded! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... deal of class feeling, not a little timidity—but almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man—that lazy abstraction—is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... contest in earnest. "I fear," she began slowly, "that my motive in staying can hardly be intelligible, unless, perhaps, Your Excellency knows why I came to Mexico in the first place. No senor, that blank smile of yours will not serve. Your Excellency cannot feign ignorance of public gossip." ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... possessed some knowledge of Italian, a language not altogether unknown to any of the family: she therefore resolved to learn French immediately; for which purpose the interpreter, for whose child she had stood godmother during these stormy times, and who now, therefore, as a gossip,[Footnote: The obsolete word, "gossip," has been revived as an equivalent for the German, "/gevatter/." But it should be observed that this word not only signifies godfather, but that the person whose child has another ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Delphine. That she owned her home, and that it had been given her by the then deceased companion of her days of beauty, were facts so generally admitted as to be, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no longer a subject of gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as a character, nor her house as a "feature." It would have passed all Creole powers of guessing to divine what you could find worthy of inquiry concerning a retired quadroon woman; and not the least puzzled of all would have been the ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... benediction. It must be that selfsame Miriam; but the sensitive sculptor felt a difference of manner, which impressed him more than he conceived it possible to be affected by so external a thing. He remembered the gossip so prevalent in Rome on Miriam's first appearance; how that she was no real artist, but the daughter of an illustrious or golden lineage, who was merely playing at necessity; mingling with human struggle for her pastime; stepping out of her native sphere only ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to retire he would say in a half-whisper, "Stay where you are." Certainly this was not done with the design of getting what he said reported abroad; for it belonged neither to my character nor my duty to gossip about what I had heard. Besides, it may be presumed, that the few who were admitted as witnesses to the conferences of Napoleon were aware of the consequences attending indiscreet disclosures under ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... goes on to describe the gossip, and pleasures, and jealousies, and scandals of Olympus which Tantalus heard and witnessed, and then ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... into the underground rooms, called sardab, which, like cellars, are frequently situated fifteen or twenty feet below the surface; at sunset they go up on to the terraces, where they receive visits, gossip, drink tea, and remain until night. This is the most pleasant time, as the evenings are cool and enlivening. Many affirm the moonlight is clearer here than with us, but I did not find this to be the case. People sleep on the terraces under mosquito nets, which surround the whole bed. The ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... arrangement, Greenfield contented itself with using its eyes, its ears, and its tongues, with one exception to the latter organ's clatter, in favor of Hitty Hyde; to her no one dared as yet approach with gossip ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... not waste your time, sir, over the Society papers. Yet you have probably heard that Madame la Duchesse and Mr. Reginald Brott have been written about and spoken about as intimate friends. They have been seen together everywhere. Gossip has been busy with their names. Mr. Brott has followed the Countess into circles which before her coming he zealously eschewed. The Countess is everywhere regarded as a widow, and a marriage ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Admiral Nagle, Sir A. Barnard, Lords Glenlyon, Hertford, and Lowther. These gentlemen generally dined with him; the dinner being the artistic product of that famous gastronomic savant, Wattiers. The Prince was very fond of listening after dinner to the gossip of society. When he became George the Fourth, no change took place in these personnels at the banquet, excepting that with the fruits and flowers of the table was introduced the beautiful Marchioness of Conyngham, whose brilliant wit, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... not the slightest tangible corroboration of this story. It might have been the merest gossip or the invention of an enemy. But it fitted Carron so perfectly, that from the day I heard it I could never, somehow, question its substantial truth. If I had questioned it, I should have repeated the story to him, to give him an opportunity to answer. But something ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... only knew more of it, and had some one to help and back me. Och! the idea of being cheated and bamboozled by that one-eyed thief in the horseman's dress.' 'Let bygones be bygones, Murtagh,' said I; 'it is no use grieving for the past; sit down, and let us have a little pleasant gossip. Arrah, Murtagh! when I saw you sitting under the wall, with your thumb to your mouth, it brought to my mind tales which you used to tell me all about Finn-ma-Coul. You have not forgotten Finn-ma-Coul, Murtagh, and how he sucked wisdom ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... newspapers of the day, saying that an alliance had been arranged between the heir to the Wharton title and property and the daughter of the present baronet. I think that this had probably originated in the club gossip. I trust it did not spring directly from the activity or ambition ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... or double suicide was suspected. The following are the details of this case: A young man of eighteen kept company with a young woman about the same age, from another town. The girls of the town were jealous of her and began to gossip about her to the extent of casting aspersions upon her character, etc. The young man's father, without investigating this case, forbade his son to marry her. However, the two lovers would have frequent secret rendezvous, and his fiancee became ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... my head is a jumble of other people's ideas already, and Herr Pedalsturm has put the piano out of tune. Mark always makes a model of me if I go to him, and I don't like to see my eyes, arms, or hair in all his pictures. Miss Hemming's gossip is worse than fussing over new things that I don't need. Bonnets are my torment, and matinees are wearisome, for people whisper and flirt till the music is spoiled. Making calls is the worst of all; for what ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the captain to himself, "this man must hear all the country gossip. Likely enough he knows where Wallace is, or the direction in which ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... the fair Wiwaste was happy-hearted, For Wakawa promised the brave Chaske. Birds of a feather will flock together. The robin sings to his ruddy mate, And the chattering jays, in the winter weather, To prate and gossip will congregate; And the cawing crows on the autumn heather, Like evil omens, will flock together, In common council for high debate; And the lass will slip from a doting mother To hang with her lad on the garden gate. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the lobby he was accosted by an old acquaintance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him with effusive cordiality and indicated a willingness to dine with him. Bartley never dined alone if he could help it, and Mainhall was a good gossip who always knew what had been going on in town; especially, he knew everything that was not printed in the newspapers. The nephew of one of the standard Victorian novelists, Mainhall bobbed about among ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... the Fleet marriage of her eccentric son— whose wife she never saw—had actually come between the wind and her nobility? Was there no finer, more ethereal touch in Elizabeth Gunning's stolen marriage with her Duke than is recorded in Horace Walpole's malicious gossip? Could such beauty have been utterly sordid? What were the fears and hopes of the lovely Maria Walpole as, after long concealment of her marriage, she trembled on the steps of a throne? How did those about her judge of Fanny Burney ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... from his own lips, we want to hear it from some third person, who will surely be glad to relate it, since he, as bearer of the news, will bring to himself something of the glory of the hero. There is malice enough in gossip, but most of it is the purest kind of mental and emotional satisfaction. Our interest in it is of exactly the same kind as our interest in novels and romances. The stories which we tell about ourselves and our friends make up the ephemeral, yet real prose ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... painful anxiety to discover one so dear and so mysteriously lost was the only cause of uneasiness apparent in the brightening Future. While these researches, hitherto fruitless, were being made, it so happened, as London began now to refill, and gossip began now to revive, that a report got abroad, no one knew how (probably from the servants) that Monsieur de Vaudemont, a distinguished French officer, was shortly to lead the daughter and sole heiress of Robert Beaufort, Esq., M.P., ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wondered at a man who had seen the world and had L4 a week of a pension wasting life with a paltry three-hundred sheep farm instead of spending his money royally with a bang. When his confidence seemed likely to carry their knowledge of his affairs no further than the town's gossip had already brought it, they lost their interest in his reflections and had time to feel sorry for the boy. None of them but knew he was an orphan in the most grievous sense of the term, without a relative ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... large, and was deeply engrossed by its own interests and troubles. The world of authorship, though extremely noisy and profoundly important, still made only a small group. One effect of a censorship is to produce much gossip and whispering about suspected productions before they see the light, and these whispers let the police into as many secrets ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... particulars, and how Robert and Arthur did devour the ill-printed provincial news-sheet issuing from the obscure Irish country town, and burning all through with political partisanship! Luckily Argent had the last received copy in his pocket, which detailed all the gossip of the election, with the familiar names, and ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... neck. Whoever had seen him, in his soberly cut coat, with his smooth-shaven, sleek, demure countenance and moderately rotund belly, leaning on the half-door of his Almacen de Panos, and witnessed his bland smile as he stepped aside to give admission to a customer or gossip, would have deemed the utmost extent of his plottings to be, how he should get his cloths a real cheaper or sell them at a real more than their market value. There was no speculation, it seemed, in that dull placid countenance, save what related to ells of cloth and steady money-getting. Beyond ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the historian limited to actual experience of regiment, camp gossip about other commands and generals ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... dejected Virtue. The trio are soon joined by Mrs. Nightwork, a midwife, who never breaks an oath of secrecy unless it be to her interest, and the character of whose contributions to the general fund of gossip may be easily imagined. This semi-allegorical method of narration is kept up during the first two volumes; in the third and fourth Mrs. Manley tells her story in her own way. In the course of these four volumes ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... return to Boyd City, and his departure so soon after, revived some whispering gossip about Amy's strange disappearance. And of course the matter was mentioned at the Ministerial Association, which still held its regular Monday morning meetings. Then, as was natural, the talk drifted to the much discussed topic, the low standard of morality in ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... you my dear, and I believe him honest enough and manly enough to acknowledge it, and sue for forgiveness. I leave you to yourselves. God grant that you may be enabled to peacably settle your difficulties satisfactorily to you both, without giving license to Madame Gossip. God bless you." Kissing Emily, Mrs. Hartright descended to ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... "planned" for some other place where Christianity did not matter as it did in Polpier. They gave various reasons for this: but their real reason (had they lived in a Palace of Truth) was that the Rev. Mark Hambly never spoke evil of any one, nor listened to gossip save with a ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... And the answer of the ladies makes us aware that they are fresh from larking in Ireland, and in France. A glorious spree they had; lots of fun; and laughter a discretion. At all times gratus puellae risus ab angulo; so that we listen to their little gossip with interest. They had been setting men, it seems, by the ears; and the drollest little atrocities they do certainly report. Not but we have seen better in the Nenagh paper, so far as Ireland is concerned. But the pet little joke was in La Vendee. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... both parties now knew of the feud between Banion and Woodhull, and the cause underlying it. Woman gossip did what it might. A half dozen determined men quietly watched Woodhull. As many continually were near Banion, although for quite a different reason. All knew that time alone must work out the answer to this implacable quarrel, and that the friends of the two ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... doubtless be playing fine French airs, and have much gossip of the composers and will perchance bring music with him that will stir us to greater study ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... of writing to you occasionally?" I finally ventured. "I am sure that you would like a bit of Barscheit gossip ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... how much slanderous gossip to believe by this time! I believe it is some trumpery curate she has been meeting at Miss ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the more becoming sunbonnet. Judith had been used to lead her following here, and the number of her swains would have been a scandal in any one else: but there was a native dignity about Judith Barrier that kept even rural gossip at bay. This morning, however, when Elder Drane gave her the customary invitation to walk down there for a drink, she refused, and all during the first service the widower had sat tall and reproachful on the men's side and reminded her of past follies. She was aware of his accusing eyes ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... survived even in the early plays of Shakespere. Nor were the characters and minor details generally of this group less disorderly and inadequate than the general schemes or the versification. Here we have the abstractions of the old Morality; there the farcical gossip of the Gammer Gurton's Needle class; elsewhere the pale and dignified personages of Gorboduc: all three being often jumbled together all in one play. In the lighter parts there are sometimes fair touches of low comedy; in the graver occasionally, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... don't believe one word of it—we didn't go in at all, the place was too smelly. And that fib about his giving me a diamond ring,—deny it please, as I have never shown it to a soul—So you can see how people manufacture gossip. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... you do, Dick? I should think you'd learned by this time to let the gossip of a public-house go in at one ear and out ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... cumpare are corruptions of the Spanish comadre and compadre, which have an origin analogous to the English "gossip" in its original meaning of "sponsor in baptism." In the Philippines these words are used among the simpler folk as familiar forms of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... or twenty red-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in a treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,—like the traditional militia company, all officers. They did not gossip, of course (it is the male that sports the red), but ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... he said to himself, being unable to sleep, "there are such dramas as that in society. Society covers great horrors with the flowers of its elegance, the embroidery of its gossip, the wit of its lies. We writers invent no more than the truth. Poor Diane! Michel had penetrated that enigma; he said that beneath her covering of ice there lay volcanoes! Bianchon and Rastignac were ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... nineteenth century has given us. This was partly, but not wholly, due to his being, for several years, the president of the Royal Society. I would willingly say much more, but I am unable to write authoritatively upon the life and work of such a man, and must leave gossip to the daily press. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... disseminate, although she received the comtesse with outstretched hand and smiling lips, she felt this consciousness of hollowness, this contempt for humanity increasing and enveloping her, and the petty gossip of the district gave her a still greater disgust, a still lower opinion of her ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he says, "to loiter in the baths of Agrippa and to hear from the idlers there the gossip of the hour. The gladiatorial struggles in the Circus Maximus and the comedies in the theaters have lost for me their relish. For the civic rewards which Tiberius gives his favored ones I have no wish. Senatorships and proconsulships are like the dust in the apothecaries' scales. I have ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... this was bad enough, but by the end of five weeks of Murphy's attachment to the payroll he had demonstrated that he was not only incapable, indolent, careless, and unreliable, but that he was a disorganizer, a gossip, and a trouble maker. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... beginning again on the toffy. She was a heavily made girl of twenty, with sleepy eyes and a dull complexion. She took little exercise, was inordinately fond of sweet things, helped her mother a little in the housekeeping, and was intimately acquainted with all the gossip of the village. So was Sarah; but her tongue was sharper than Lulu's, and her brain quicker. She was therefore the unpopular sister; while for Lulu her acquaintances felt rather a contemptuous indulgence. Sarah had had various love affairs, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Great thoughts, profound speculations, matters of experience, bits of observation, delicate fancies, romantic sentiments, humorous criticisms on people and things, funny stories, dreams of the future, memories of the past, pictures of the present, the merest gossip, the veriest trifling, everything, nothing, may form the theme, if naturally spoken of, not hunted up to fill out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... without being seen, still lay on the hay, looking, listening, and thinking. The peasantry, gathered on the prairie, scarcely slept throughout the short summer night. At first there were gay gossip and laughter while everybody was eating; ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... this morning, and to-morrow morning, and for many mornings to come. And, by the way, Prudence, while I have honored you with my confidence, permit me to impress it upon you that this revelation is not village gossip as yet, and you will put me under further obligations by not mentioning the circumstance. Good-morning, Prudence. Kindly call the ladies at ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... were published before her death; but it will be seen by the following extract from one of her letters, that she was quite prepared to admit the merits of 'Waverley'; and it is remarkable that, living, as she did, far apart from the gossip of the literary world, she should even then have spoken so confidently of his being ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... "I've heard gossip that he's anxious to stand well with the King of Spain. It occurred to me he might have some political interest in trying to learn the real name of Mr. Trevenna, if you pardon my having such a thought. He might have sent his chauffeur to look at ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... performance announced as her last appearance, "she continued," says Dr. Burney, "to sing more last and positively last times and never left England at all." There was a rivalry between the two queens of song, which being a novelty, furnished gossip and laughter for all London. Hughes, that "agreeable poet," ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Because at the beginning of the century, when Brighton was being built, fragments of architectural gossip were flying about Sussex, and one of these had found its way to, and had rested in, the heart of the grandfather of the present owner: in a simple and bucolic way he had been seized by a desire for taste and style, and the present building was the result. Therefore it will be well ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Castle. With him were associated Glencairn as Lord Chancellor, Lauderdale as Secretary of State, Rothes as President of the Council, and Crawford as Lord Treasurer. The first proceeding of this Parliament, known in the gossip of the time as the Drunken Parliament from the too frequent condition of its chiefs, was to pass a Rescissory Act, repealing all measures that had become law since the year 1633, including even those passed by the Parliament professing the authority of Charles himself. This was followed ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... material for gossip, in which the blame was laid upon the commander of the troops and his favorite Don Tomas, and even on the Augustinian friars themselves, for having all left the city that day in order that thus the bishop could carry out his purpose, without its being easy to secure recourse ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... and while her beauteous sleep Was blest with many a happy dream of Love, Untended still, her silly, vagrant sheep Afar from that young shepherdess did rove, Along the vales and through the gossip grove, O'er daisied meads and ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... went along, she pointed out to Ellen two or three houses in the distance, and gave her not a little gossip about the people who lived in them; but all this Ellen scarcely heard, and cared nothing at all about. She had paused by the side of a large rock standing alone by the wayside, and was looking ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... upon her, and swiftly drove the expression from her own eyes and returned Thornton's greeting indifferently. Some day her uncle would accuse this man, but she did not care to give her personal affair over to the tongue of gossip, nor did she care to have her name linked in any ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... babes by threatening them with tales of the dreadful robber who carried off little children in his great beak. Soon the name extended, and Black Eagle, the Terror of the Border, became a recognized factor in exaggerated newspaper reports and ranch gossip. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... otherwise than as a group, and merely with generic features. He had a Frau von Kamecke for Head Governess,—the lady whom Wilhelmina, in her famed Memoires, always writes KAMKEN; and of whom, except the floating gossip found in that Book, there is nothing to be remembered. Under her, as practical superintendent, SOUS-GOUVERNANTE and quasi-mother, was the Dame de Roucoulles, a more important person for us here. Dame de Roucoulles, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... that I saw no interesting costume; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying age. The only vivid memory of these people which remains with me is the cadence of their speech. Whilst I was breakfasting, two women stood at gossip on a near balcony, and their utterance was a curious exaggeration of the Neapolitan accent; every sentence rose to a high note, and fell away in a long curve of sound, sometimes a musical wail, more often a mere whining. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight. Henderson seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse; but roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discoloured eye, and looked particularly vicious ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... you well must know, The stream of talk will all at once run low, The air seems smitten with a sudden chill, The wit grows silent and the gossip still; This was our poet's chance, the hour of need, When rhymes and stories we were used to read. One day a whisper round the teacups stole,— "No scrap of paper in the silver bowl!" (Our "poet's corner" may I not expect My kindly reader still may ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... range and as far south as the railroad it was current gossip that the Three Bar would pay a thousand dollars reward for each of fifteen men, a fast saddle horse thrown in and no questions asked. The men were named, and if the rumor was based on truth it was virtually placing a bounty on the scalps ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... it in me to unhate my hates,— I use up my last strength to strike once more Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face, To trample underfoot the whine and wile Of beast Violante,—and I grow one gorge To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale Poison my hasty hunger took for food. A strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk, No cloying cups, no sickly ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... mite societies of the several churches in Sardis had been merged into one consolidated Lint-Scraping and Bandage-Making Union, in whose enlarged confines the waves of gossip flowed with as much more force and volume as other waves gain when the floods unite a number of small pools into one ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... ere he had half disburdened his budget of Escurial gossip, Nignio de Zuniga had his own grievances to confide. Uppermost in his mind, was the irritation of having been employed that morning in a cow-hunt; and from execrations on the name of the old woman, enriched with all the blasphemies of a trooper's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... the very heart of it, hearing the flirtation, the theatrical chatter, the homely gossip about her, Norma knew that she was at home. Leslie, perhaps, might have loathed it had she been put down in the midst of it; to Aunt Annie it would always seem entirely beneath even contempt. But Norma realized to-night, as she slipped into church for a few ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... seen carried along its streets in an old arm-chair, laughing heartily,—or when hastening to arrest the massacre at the Hotel de Ville, she stops to look at Madame Riche, the ribbon-vendor, talking in her chemise to her gossip, the beadle of St. Jacques, who has nothing on but his drawers,—the reader is always reminded that he sees and hears the granddaughter of Henry IV.—a Parisian with a touch of the princess in all she says and does, and he cannot help asking ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... news from over-hearing the garrison-gossip, the rest of it I got from Potter, the General's dog. Potter is the great Dane. He is privileged, all over the post, like Shekels, the Seventh Cavalry's dog, and visits everybody's quarters and picks up everything that ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... persons of so great eminence and importance were apparently mixed up in it, while, at the same time, the evidence was so circumstantial, that it was no wonder the matter gave food for plenty of curiosity and gossip. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the surface. At the same time, from scouting parties and deserters at other points we learned that rumors are rife throughout the enemy forces of some scheme now on foot that will overwhelm us within a very short time. No details have been given, but so widespread is the gossip, and so consistent, that we have been forced to the conclusion that it cannot be reasonably dismissed ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... a taste for literature, and his miscellaneous works include The Savages of Europe (London, 1764), a satire on the English which he translated from the French, and Anccdotes Ancient and Modern (London, 1789) a.n amusing collection of gossip. His chief work was a History of Great Britain connected with the Chronology of Europe from Caesar's Invasion to Accession of Edward VI., in 2 vols. (London, 1794-1795) . Its plan is somewhat singular, as a portion of the history of England is given on one page, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... takes none whatever in me, that I thought I would send her word of the piece of preferment which has occurred to me since, viz. being sent for by the Queen Dowager, who desired my friend Mademoiselle d'Este to bring me to call upon her. But what wonderful gossip it does seem to be writing gravely round and round from Leamington to London, and from ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... you? Yes, I did follow you." She looked at him, then past him toward a corner of the wide hall where a maid in cap and apron sat pretending to be sewing. "Careful!" she motioned with smiling lips, "servants gossip. ... Good ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... old gossip-pots! I just sat and looked at them there at supper, and I said to myself, I said, to think they drown kittens and let ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... their instruments. On the floor above, where room after room shone in beauty, with costly furnishings, and perfect harmonies, white-capped maids flitted about, putting last touches to dressing tables and pausing to gossip ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... I ran against a man I knew, named Wardle, one of the sub-editors of a Sunday newspaper, then on his way home from Fleet Street. Wardle was tired and sleepy, but stopped to exchange a few words of journalistic gossip. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... you have wished me to encourage. Pauline and I here, and Rose, whom you have met, seek our friends in no other direction. We are never alone, and, as you very well know, not a day has passed that I have not sent you some little word of gossip or information—the gossip of the navy and the gossip of the army—and there is always some truth underneath what these young men say. It is what you desire, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found that even there there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of young men who had ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... earlier contingent was drawn together in conversation as close as chairs would permit, and as the belated ones entered they were greeted with exclamations in which there was an extra touch of the joy of life, it being in the very nature of gossip to seek new openings and exploit itself in mystery ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... and Mr. Fairchild without business, and Mrs. Fairchild without gossip, had a very quiet, dull time of it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King Philip had on his hands a far more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... they have told you libels and made you angry again by repeating to you the gossip of ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth. You can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and your ailments and the people who have offended you. [Turning to Hector]. Do you know what they call ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... the great Past were marching in ghostly procession through our fancies? What were sunsets to us, who were about to live and breathe and walk in actual Athens; yea, and go far down into the dead centuries and bid in person for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public market-place, or gossip with the neighbors about the siege of Troy or the splendid deeds of Marathon? We scorned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bleibt Deutsch"—"What we are now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"—there is an answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a piece of money. Secret sin was eating away Belgium's vitality—the sin of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits of service, amiable passages destroying nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Albert has cleared his people ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... way to the dining-room. "I said we would have everything put on the table," said the Vicar, "and wait on ourselves; that will leave us quite free to talk. It's not a lack of any respect, Howard—quite the contrary; but these honest people down here pick up all sorts of gossip—in a quiet life, you know, a little gossip goes a long way; and even my good maids are human—I should be so in their place! Howard, a bit of this chicken—our own chickens, our own vegetables, our country cider—everything home-grown; and now to business, and we will settle ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the monster boar the day's hunt comes to an end. The spot is close to the rendezvous, and most of the parties have arrived, or are not far off. There is an interchange of gossip over the doings of the day among the various groups; and, by-and-by, a count up of the number of pigs killed. Ears and tails are produced as vouchers, and about three hundred and fifty pigs, big and little, are thus accounted for, while half a dozen pair of tusks, of more than ordinary size, denote ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Bellevue began to gossip about the couple at Highcourt, and divided as always into two camps with shades of opinion within each camp. The women were generally for Archie, even if he had been foolish with his wife's money and was conducting his "affair" with Irene Pointer rather recklessly. If his wife were less ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... 14s. 6d.,[27] probably covered the whole of this. A note on the receipt speaks of a picture at the east end in 1800, a pulpit in 1806, and a new window in 1808; but whether all these were new or merely repaired does not appear. From Goodwin's "Ely Gossip" we learn that the upper part of the doorway of the galilee porch was "renewed in plaster." In a pamphlet published in 1827 it is said that "so much has been done to this cathedral of late as to afford a reasonable ground of hope, that ere long ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... you're my friend, and I tell you I would rather be hacked in pieces by Apaches than soil that child's white soul by a single unclean breath. There mustn't be any talk. Do you understand? Keep the story out of the newspapers. Don't let any of our people gossip about it. I have told you because I want you to know the truth. If any one should speak lightly about this thing stop him at once. This is the one point on which Simon Harley and I will pull together. Any man who joins ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... been all kinds of speculation and gossip at the dog house as to the new system of business expansion adopted by the Great Northern. That road had acquired new branches during the past year, and was becoming a big system of itself. There was talk about a consolidation ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... A gossip writer states that he saw a man carrying two artificial legs while travelling in a Tube train. There is nothing like being prepared for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the poor woman began to cry afresh. The sound of a stick knocking at the back door completed the victory, and Mrs Prothero went sobbing upstairs, whilst Gladys opened the door to admit Nancy, Cwmriddle, and another gossip who had overtaken her. Mr Prothero came into the ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past (1883) contains some interesting sketches of Washington society, while N. Sargent's Public Men and Events (2 vols., 1875) supplies an abundance of political gossip. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the great man. "Mrs. Macfadyen and I were on the gossip last night, and I know the whole story ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... in his chair, and with a benign glance round, which, his scapegrace son said, meant: "Bless you, my children! Be happy and good in your own way, but don't make a noise!" he sank into a gentle doze, and the rest of the party relapsed into trivial gossip, some of which I give for what it is worth by way of illustration. It shows Ideala at about her worst, but marks a period in her career, a turning-point for the better. She was seldom bitter, and still more rarely frivolous, after ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... operations. So it appeared dame Peggy, with all her tempers, had one good point at least, and one but seldom found in servants,—a lookout for her employer's interests. The bluffy housekeeper was given to gossip, too, as all of her class are; and who could give her a better synopsis of the private affairs of half the families in Wimbledon, than Dilly Danforth, the washerwoman, who performed the drudgery and slop-work in many of the fine homes of the upper class? ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... was unendurable, and to talk to her father or grandfather would be a great relief, yet the first beginning might well be dreaded. Neither of them was forthcoming, and now in the evening to hear the quiet grave discussion of Allonfield gossip was excessively harassing and irritating. No one spoke for their own pleasure, the thoughts of all were elsewhere, and they only talked thus for the sake of politeness; but she gave them no credit for ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I am delighted that literature is so flourishing and that men are giving such open proofs of brains, even though audiences are found so slow in coming together. People as a rule lounge in the squares and waste the time in gossip when they should be listening to the recital. They get some one to come and tell them whether the reciter has entered the hall yet, whether he has got through his introduction, or whether he has nearly reached ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... card party was given yesterday by a number of reputed ladies. Mrs. Smith, gossip says, was hostess. It is alleged that the guests with the exception of Mrs. Bellinger, who says she hails from Leavitt's Junction, were all from here. Mrs. Smith claims to be the wife of Archibald Smith, the so-called 'Honest Man' trading ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... woman, gray-haired and tanned like an Indian squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from the handles over her shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That afternoon under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight or ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side of the wagon a ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Monday, and returned here yesterday; go away to- morrow. It has been a dreadfully idle life all day long, facendo niente, incessant gossip and dawdle, poor, unprofitable talk, and no rational employment. Brougham was here a little while ago for a week. He, Lord Wellesley, and Lord Anglesey form a discontented triumvirate, and are knit together by the common bond of a sense of ill-usage and of merit neglected. Wellesley and Anglesey ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... tales of Boccaccio's Decameron were read with great delight by Margaret, by Francis the First, and by his children. They resolved, therefore, to imitate the great Italian novelist by committing to writing the most remarkable incidents supplied by the gossip of the court (see the Prologue to the Heptameron). Francis and his children, finding that Margaret greatly excelled in this species of composition, soon renounced the unequal strife, but encouraged her to pursue an undertaking promising to afford them much amusement. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... him, for you know Peter is a great gossip. But he didn't say anything, because he didn't know just what to say, and in a minute Grandfather Frog began the story ...
— Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... embarrassment over meeting her, he certainly gave no sign of it. He sat down on the railing, pushed back his hat, and looked as though he was preparing for a real soul-feast of reminiscent gossip. "Just get in?" he asked, by way of opening wider the channel of talk. He lighted a cigarette and flipped the match down into the street. "I've been here three or four months. I'm part of the Mexican revolution, though I don't reckon I look it. We been keeping ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... not so apparent in his social intercourse; and before he has been three months in Ashfield, he has given tongue to gossip, and all the old ladies comment upon his enslavement to the pretty Rose Elderkin. And they talk by the book; he is desperately enamored. Young clergymen have this way of falling, at sight, into the toils, which is vastly refreshing to middle-aged observers. But we have no occasion to detail his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Our house was near the river-side, and we were surrounded by the families of those who followed the sea, and we endeavored to flatter ourselves with the idea, that idle tales of marvelous things are very common among that class of population; and that the stories we heard were mere gossip, as we whispered to ourselves, for fear of being overheard through the thin partition which divided us from the other tenant. But, 'No!' said one of our callers in a low voice—one of the Pearse girls (a young lady, by the ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... a few hours in the laboratory, Walter," he remarked, as we parted at the subway. "I think, if you have nothing better to do, that you might employ the time in looking up some of the gossip about Mrs. Maitland and Masterson, to say nothing of Dr. Ross," he emphasised. "Drop in ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... Prauw paused to take breath, and to take a sip of the gossip tankard that stood at his elbow. His auditors remained with open mouths and outstretched necks, gaping like a nest of swallows for an ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... that, being conscious of entire purity in thought, word, and deed, she looked on it as due to her own character to show that she set all such detraction and detractors at defiance. To all cavilers, as also to her mother, whose uneasiness was frequently aroused by gossip which reached Vienna from Paris, her invariable reply was that her way of life had the king her husband's entire approbation. And while he felt a conjugal satisfaction in the contemplation of his queen's attractions and graces, the qualities in which, as he was well aware, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... that he never approached Betty after service, or on any occasion, and while it caused some wonder and gossip among them, for Betty enjoyed the distinction of being the belle of the border, they were secretly pleased. Little hints and knowing smiles, with which girls are so skillful, made known to Betty all of this, and, although she was ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of dawn. We shivered and rubbed our hands. Then we fell into tramps' gossip about the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... hurl. At hari hohi. At the flat bowls. At I set me down. At the veer and turn. At earl beardy. At rogue and ruffian. At the old mode. At bumbatch touch. At draw the spit. At the mysterious trough. At put out. At the short bowls. At gossip lend me your sack. At the dapple-grey. At the ramcod ball. At cock and crank it. At thrust out the harlot. At break-pot. At Marseilles figs. At my desire. At nicknamry. At twirly whirlytrill. At stick and hole. At the rush bundles. At boke or him, or flaying the fox. At the short staff. At ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... wedding ceremony, the man's hair was tightly frizzed by Maniort, the leading hair-dresser of the day. He was the proprietor of the Knickerbocker Barber-Shop at Broadway and Wall Street, and the town gossip. Years later he was to enjoy the patronage of the Third Napoleon in Paris as a reward for favours extended to the Prince when the latter was an exile here. There is little record of elaborate pre-nuptial bachelor dinners in the style of modern New York. What ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... difference on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck. The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs. Now and then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much demonstration and so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained or snowed the aesthetic ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to blame," this unexpected visitor confessed. "On the other hand, I have been very much absorbed. If you haven't happened to hear any South African gossip lately, Mangan, I suppose it will be a surprise to you to hear that I have been making ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dear reader, a little tired of what is called "Literary Gossip"? Be frank. Aren't you? And have you not sometimes longed even more to know what the industrious fellows were not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... thought you were too sensible to listen to servant's gossip," said Mr. Gresley, impatiently. "Your own common-sense will tell you that Hester never performed that journey on foot. I told Dr. Brown the same, but he lost his temper at once. It's curious how patient he is in a sick-room, and how furious he can be out of it. He was very angry with me, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... that there was nothing of the gossip in Randall Byrne, but now he was pardonably excited and perceiving the tall form of Hank Dwight in the doorway ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... truth of personal gossip, there is no doubt that Bruckner lent himself and his art to a championing of the reactionary cause in the form that was intrinsically at odds with its spirit. Hence in later works of Bruckner these strange episodes of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... I don't mean no affront upon my soul; but I have stood the nonsense before now, and been flung—but I von't be sarved out in that there way any more. I am up to the gossip, and expects you'll come ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... forgotten, and the mind looked forward—filling with thoughts of the sand-hills or the woods, wandering down a road that was bright with pleasure. Now and again a neighbor would step in, and while away the time with his gossip; something or other had happened, and Master Andres, who was so clever, must say what he thought about it. Sounds that had been confused during the day now entered the workshop, so that those within felt that they were participating in the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... something of it in the village," Lestrange admitted gravely. "Please do not think me fond of gossip; I could not avoid it. But I should not have imagined this a family ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... publish a book called "Memoirs of my Life," which is looked for with great expectations by both the admirers of her genius and the lovers of scandalous gossip. It is certain that if she makes a clean breast of her adventures and experiences, the world will have reason both for admiration and disgust over the confessions: admiration for the generosity of her character—for she never did a mean thing, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... your snobbishness just as I do; besides, I do not approve of your taking eatables to school," she added, disingenuously, for her objection was to furnishing food for Harmouth gossip—not to Dicky. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... yawning luxuriously. "The sun is bright, the sea is blue, and the confidences of this old palm are soothing. He's a great old gossip, this palm." He looked up into the rustling fronds and smiled. "He whispers me to sleep," he went on, "or he talks me awake—talks about all sorts of things—things he has seen—cyclones, wrecks, and strange ships and Cuban refugees and Spanish spies and lovers that meet here ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... have two clear purposes: Their first purpose is to make certain that this Nation's security is not jeopardized by false servants. Their second purpose is to clear the atmosphere of that unreasoned suspicion that accepts rumor and gossip as substitutes for evidence. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... for many years professor at Bologna. Against the Church and the monks his language is as abusive as that of the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the last degree, and he constantly introduces himself in all his local history and gossip. But he knows how to speak to the edification of the true God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter to the prayers of a saintly priest. On one occasion, after enumerating the follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: 'Our theologians, too, quarrel about "the guinea-pig's tail," ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... and his conduct contrasted very favourably in English opinion to that of the English minister. Earl Clarendon and Lord Palmerston held back from the British parliament and public a correct knowledge of the facts, until it transpired, through Parisian gossip, that the French, English, and Austrian ministers were willing to accept peace on the condition of Russia and the allies keeping an equal naval armament in the Black Sea. The way in which Austria had hoodwinked the Western negotiators, and played ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... George, or rather by the Dragon, who may be a kinsman of the fiend in the straw, a most comical chance!" said Varney. "How sayest thou, Lambourne, wilt thou stand godfather for the nonce? If the devil were to choose a gossip, I know no one more fit ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... will believe I have no personal feelings in this matter, but we may as well face the fact even now that O'Connell holding his tongue to-morrow won't stop gossip in the House, club gossip, gossip in drawing rooms. What do the Radicals really care so long as a scandal doesn't get into the papers! There's an inner circle with ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and, knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life that shall ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... shameful story, every word, from my lightning vision to my gossip with Marcel in the antechamber, he listening in hopeless silence. At length I finished. It seemed hours since he had spoken. At last he said, "Then it is true." The grayness of his face drew the ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... from their olden fashion of singing and talking out the midnight hour. Himself unseen, Mr. Aylett scrutinized the two mounting the stairs side by side—Rosa's dark, mobile face, arch with smiles, while she chattered over a bit of country gossip she had heard that afternoon from a visitor, and the weary calm of Mabel's visage, the drooping eyelids, and, when appealed to directly by her volatile comrade, the measured, not melancholy cadence of her answer, The girl had had a sore fight, and ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... anxious to leave the city, which she knew was in a fresh ferment of gossip and conjecture on the subject of her lost husband, the deceased governor-elect. The news from the Indian Territory had renewed all the public interest in the mystery ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... France can thus gossip together, And CARNOT and SALISBURY thus hob-a-nob, We'll hope for set-fair international weather. Our RAIKES and their ROCHE appear well "on the job." The Telephone's triumph at least is not sinister. Things should go easier somehow—with care, When patriot Minister ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... affairs. While quite as simple-minded as Wulf, he appeared far more sinister. Juve also divined without much difficulty that his wife, Madame Heloise Heberlauf, was the best informed woman in the kingdom regarding gossip and scandal. ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... Bible out of the hands of the laity,—and this is what he has thought: "If I can keep the laity from reading the Scripture, I will then bring the priests over from the Bible to Aristotle, so that gossip they what they will, the laity must hear just what they set forth; while if the laity should read the Scripture, the priests must study it too, in order that they may not be detected and overcome." But look you now at what St. Peter ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... last bridge the Jhelum broadens out into a stately river, controlled at one side by the banked walk known as the Bund, with the Club House upon it and the line of houseboats beneath. Here the visitors flutter up and down and exchange the gossip, the bridge appointments, the little dinners that sit so incongruously on the ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... people have been interested in and entertained by gossip respecting the personal habits and individual idiosyncrasies of popular writers and orators. It is a universal and undying characteristic of human nature. No age has been exempt from it from PLINY'S time down to BEECHER'S. It may suitably be called the scarlet-fever of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... had, however, unsuspected reserves of vitality. He crept out into the sunshine again, basking in the vernal warmth with a sense of luxury, and entering into the gossip of the ditchers with an unwonted ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... himself, "this man must hear all the country gossip. Likely enough he knows where Wallace is, or the direction in which 'tis thought he ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... to discern, and instinct to adopt, the conditions which will make of it the best that can be, is very necessarily ignored by philosophers who propose, as a beautiful fulfilment of human destinies, a life entertained by scientific gossip, in a cellar lighted by electric sparks, warmed by tubular inflation, drained by buried rivers, and fed, by the ministry of less learned and better provisioned races, with extract of beef, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat of ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... thrown wide open, and men are busy there mending the harness, under the superintendence of Mr. Goby, the "whittaw," otherwise saddler, who entertains them with the latest Treddleston gossip. It is certainly rather an unfortunate day that Alick, the shepherd, has chosen for having the whittaws, since the morning turned out so wet; and Mrs. Poyser has spoken her mind pretty strongly as to the dirt which the extra number of men's shoes brought into the house at dinnertime. Indeed, she ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... other animals, but are always found in villages or large settlements. They are a wild, frolicksome set of fellows when undisturbed, restless, and ever on the move. They seem to take especial delight in chattering away the time, and visiting about, from hole to hole, to gossip and talk over one another's affairs; at least, so their actions would indicate. Old hunters say that when they find a good location for a village, and no water is handy, they dig a well to supply the wants of ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... a culture of their own, but their minds are narrowed by the petty lives they live, lives in many instances bounded by no wider horizon than thoughts concerning their husbands and children and jewels and curries, and always their next-door neighbour's squabbles and the gossip of the place. Much of this gossip deals with matters which are not of an elevating character. It takes us years to understand it, because most of the conversation is carried on in allusion or innuendo. But it is understood by the children. One of our converts told me that she often ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... she would tell me; or, if I did not meet her, to wait two houses below hers, till she came along. She would not want me long, and very soon I could go back and have as good a time as I pleased. But she would like me to be secret, for her errand was not one for gossip, ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you—but ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the stores were open and well filled with men, but to Kurt's sharp eyes there appeared to be much more gossip going on than business. The town was not as slow and quiet as was usual with Bend towns. He listened for war talk, and heard none. Two out of every three men who spoke in his hearing did not use the English language. Kurt went into the office of the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... every other day now, in the afternoon. It was his custom to sit for a while on the porch chatting cheerily with Virginia, his stout frame filling the rocking-chair. Dr. Polk's indulgence was gossip—though always of a harmless nature: how Mr. Cluyme always managed to squirm over to the side which was in favor, and how Maude Catherwood's love-letter to a certain dashing officer of the Confederate army had been captured and ruthlessly published in the hateful ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her day, hae served the best lord in the land, for as little as ye think o' her, Mr. Saddletree," said Mrs. Howden, somewhat indignant at the contemptuous way in which her gossip was mentioned; "when she and I were twa gilpies, we little thought to hae sitten doun wi' the like o' my auld Davie Howden, or ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of speculation and gossip at the dog house as to the new system of business expansion adopted by the Great Northern. That road had acquired new branches during the past year, and was becoming a big system of itself. There ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... stage-writing," as Theobald most Theobaldice phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-stealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakespeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that they are the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... him dubiously: "No," she said; "it's something besides that. The family have probably filled your ears with silly gossip. Mr. Phipps was wild at one time—he told me all about it. But that's ancient history; you can take my ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... we took in a party of ladies, which somewhat relieved the monotony of the cabin, and I was amused by listening to their lively prattle, and the little gossip with which they strove to wile away the tedium of the voyage. The day was too stormy to go upon deck—thunder and lightening, accompanied with torrents of rain. Amid the confusion of the elements, I tried to get a peep at the Lake of the Thousand Isles; but the driving storm blended ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... of shocking gossip of this description that I've heard since I've been in your house is already more than I've heard in the whole course of my life! Dr. Maybury would never allow a word of gossip in our rooms." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... which these anecdotes occasioned, the Judge came in: delighted with the merriment, and delighted with his wife, he seated himself beside her, quite covetous of an hour's gossip with the ladies. Mrs. Gunilla served him up the human soul in the Orbis Pictus, and Elise instigated her still further to the relation of the purification of the boys. The Judge laughed at both from the bottom of his heart, and then the conversation turned again ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... those days, we aimless knights-errant with dinner-pail and slate; the dry, frosty hollow where gentians bloom when the pride of the field is over, the woody slopes of the hepatica's awakening, under coverlet of withered leaves, and the sunny banks where violets love to live with their good gossip, the trembling anemone. At noon, we roved abroad into solitudes so deep that even our unsuspecting hearts sometimes quaked with fear of dark and lonesomeness; and then we came trooping back at the sound of the bell, untamed, happy little savages, ready to settle, with a ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... who often themselves rode into the taverns to learn from the travellers what was happening in the great world beyond the mountains. Court-day was a great occasion; all the neighborhood flocked in to gossip, lounge, race horses, and fight. Of course in such gatherings there were always certain privileged characters. At Abingdon these were to be found in the persons of a hunter named Edward Callahan, and his wife Sukey. As regularly as court-day came round they appeared, Sukey driving a cart ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... laughter and shouting went up and down their dusty lengths, with a lively accompaniment of curry-combs knocking against back fences and stable walls, for the darkies loved to curry their horses in the alley. Darkies always prefer to gossip in shouts instead of whispers; and they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is almost worthless. Horrible phrases were caught by early rising children and carried to older people for definition, sometimes at inopportune moments; while less investigative children ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... valuable than that of Tacitus or Suetonius to the vices of the Roman emperors. The dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors, again, are trustworthy, seeing they were always written with political intention and not for the sake of gossip. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... noon we could see white clouds of alkali dust ahead. By and by we came up with the dust-raisers. The children and I had got into the buckboard with Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and Miss Hull, so as to ride easier and be able to gossip, and we had driven ahead of the wagons, so as to avoid ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... character; he weighed them in his balance, and found them wanting. In a letter to his wife, he writes: "Nothing but miserable trifles do these people trouble themselves about. They strike me as infinitely more ridiculous with their important ponderosity concerning the gathered rags of gossip, than even a member of the Second Chamber of Berlin in the full consciousness of his dignity.... The men of the minor States are mostly mere caricatures of periwig diplomatists, who at once put on their official visage if I merely beg of them a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... to blush, if comparisons were drawn between the free and slave States. And although our presses do not teem with controversial pamphlets, nor our pulpits shake with excommunicating thunders, the daily walk of our religious communicants furnishes, apparently, as little food for gossip as is to be found in most other regions. It may be regarded as a mark of our want of excitability—though that is a quality accredited to us in an eminent degree—that few of the remarkable religious Isms of the present day have taken root among us. We have been so irreverent as to laugh at Mormonism ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Jessica. "We never do gossip, but I think she has furnished plenty of material so ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... or swing in hammocks on the broad veranda that runs round three sides of the house. The cottages lie so close together that a good jumper can easily spring from one veranda to the next, and the lady proprietors gossip across, and the men too when they come down from business every evening, or from Saturday till Monday. My lot is generally the shorter allowance, and one Sunday afternoon I lay in my favorite hammock on the north side of the veranda, sleeping the ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... to be good-looking"—she herself is not sure on the point; she feels that possibly she may be prejudiced; she puts before you merely the current gossip of the neighbourhood; people say she is beautiful; they may be right, they may be wrong: it is not for her to decide—"well-educated, of affectionate disposition, possessed of means, desires to meet gentleman with a ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... had a morbid curiosity to know each action of the woman she injured. The people whispered that Ferrari instructed the Graevenitz in the mysterious and terrible secrets of Italian poisons. This gossip reached the ears of Johanna Elizabetha and she trembled, fearing poison in all she ate, in all she touched, in the petals of the roses of the castle garden, in the dust which lay on ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... do you know that's new?" Mr. Crow asked him. The old gentleman was a very curious person. Being a great gossip, he was always on the lookout for ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... time he found that he could no longer endure a narrow country life. He tried to give his paper a literary tone; but the people did not want a literary paper. They cared more for local news and gossip, which he hated. ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... After a prolonged residence at Southport, he had died, at the age of eighty-two, leaving his property behind. For sixty years he had been a name, not a figure; and the news of his death, which was assuredly an event, incited the burgesses to gossip, for they had come to regard him as one of the invisible immortals. Constance was shocked, though she had never seen Mericarp. ("Everybody dies nowadays!" she thought.) He owned the Baines-Povey shop, and also Mr. Critchlow's shop. Constance knew ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... humiliated as indignant at having heard it. Would not the most elementary good-breeding teach them to speak in a lower tone about such matters when we are near at hand. Etretat is, moreover, the country of gossip and scandal. From five to seven o'clock you can see people wandering about in quest of scandal, which they retail from group to group. As you remarked to me, my dear aunt, tittle-tattle is the mark of petty individuals ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in her private sitting-room when this conversation occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate's innocent introduction of Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual with him in matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond's remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Casaubon. At that moment he was only caring for what would recommend the Farebrother family; and he had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... memory the remarkable manner in which Father Cotton, the Jesuit, had given me a warning by a word about a boxwood fire. After a moment's thought, therefore, I summoned Boisrueil, one of my gentlemen, who had an acknowledged talent for collecting gossip; and I told him in a casual way that M. de Perrot ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... doing the share that falls to her, or that she may work out to herself agreeably to her own special aptitude, cheerfully and faithfully—not going down to it, but bringing it up to her. We have proposed to enter our protest against all idle gossip, against all demoralizing and wicked waste of time, also, against the follies and the tyrannies of fashion, against all external impositions and disabilities; in short, against each and every thing that opposes the full development and use of the faculties conferred ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... no daily papers in Meer, and now there were no young men to go to the city and bring back the gossip of the day, as there had used to be. The women, with their babies on their arms, stood about in the street, talking quietly and sadly among themselves. On the doorsteps a few old men lingered together over their pipes. Already the bigger boys were playing soldier, ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... led him on. They talked of the dances and games, little gossip of the university, with now and then a telling personality, and a sweep of long lashes over pearly cheeks, or a lifting of great, innocent eyes of admiration to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... daughter's letter of farewell he instantly despatched Madame Dumay to Paris. The family gave out that a journey to another climate had suddenly been advised for Caroline by their physician; and the physician himself sustained the excuse, though unable to prevent some gossip in the society of Havre. "Such a vigorous young girl! with the complexion of a Spaniard, and that black hair!—she consumptive!" "Yes, they say she committed some imprudence." "Ah, ah!" cried a Vilquin. "I am told she came back bathed ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... passed pleasantly enough. Gradually the jaundice was disappearing, and Vane was becoming normal again. The war seemed very far away from Rumfold; though occasionally a newcomer brought some bit of intimate gossip about Crucifix Alley or Hell Fire Corner, or one of the little places not shown on any map, which mean so much more to the actual fighting man than all the big towns rolled together. Pipes would come out and men would draw together in the smoking-room—while in imagination the green flares ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... during the whole period of excitement and suspense. Like a wounded bird, she withdrew herself from the light and noisy chatter of her friends, seeking only solitude and crepuscular nooks in which to suffer silently. Jean brought her every picturesque bit of the ghastly gossip, thus heaping coals on the fire of her torture. But she did not grow pale and thin. Not a dimple fled from cheek or chin, not a ray of saucy sweetness vanished from her eyes. Her riant health was unalterable. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... would Grandfather Ball, late of Epping Forest, say? What would come of the grand christening that was to be graced by the imposing presence of Colonel Bradford Custis of Jamestown? How the Jeffersons and Randolphs and Masons and Pages and Slaughters and Carters and Ayletts and Henrys would gossip and chuckle, and how he—Lawrence—would be held up to the scorn and the derision of the facetious yeomen of Westmoreland! It ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... in Paris and in London, and a universal favorite, especially with the women, in the highest society of both capitals. His social position, friendly intimacy with several of the most celebrated musical and dramatic artists of his day, passion for political and private gossip, easy and pleasant style of letter-writing, and general rather supercilious fastidiousness, used sometimes to remind me of Horace Walpole. He had a singularly kind heart and amiable nature, for a life ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of rehearsal, sir," Packer answered in haste. "Entirely outside. She wanted to know if I'd heard any gossip about her husband lately. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... much for foxes, he was willing, usually, to stop and talk with one of that family—provided he wasn't too busy digging to take the time for gossip. ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... I've heard of him," Cobo remarked, when his caller had finished his account. "He has reason to hate you, I dare say, for you robbed him." The Colonel smiled disagreeably. He was a disagreeable fellow, so dark of skin as to lend credence to the gossip regarding his parentage; a loud, strutting, domineering person, whose record in Santa Clara Province was such that only ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... made firm rebellion against this yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions. The newspapers, the gossip of the village, his own picturings had aroused him to an uncheckable degree. They were in truth fighting finely down there. Almost every day the newspapers printed accounts of ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... for scarcely more than a greeting and good-bye. On the other hand, Mrs. Warren had always talked and written to her a great deal about him. Chic and he had been roommates in college, and ever since had kept in close touch with each other by letter. The trivial gossip of Monte's life had always been passed on to Marjory, so that she had really for these last few years been following his movements and adventures month by month, until she felt in almost as intimate ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a leading part in the religious services of the castle, and was soon regarded as almost one of the family. At first, according to his usual custom, he would talk about nothing but religion. But gradually his manner changed. He opened out, grew less reserved, and would gossip and chat like a woman. He asked himself the reason of this alteration. He discovered it. He was in love with his young cousin, Theodora. For a while the gentle stream of love ran smooth. His mother ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's—any ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... think, fear, hope, rejoice, plan, and purpose; but always about this world,—never about the other! To rise in the morning; to be occupied during the day; to buy and sell, and get gain; to talk on politics or trade; to gossip about people, and all they speak or do; to marry or give in marriage; to have this meeting or that parting; to give a feast or partake of one; to fear sickness, and to keep it off; or to be sick, and to try and get better:—all this sort of life, down to its veriest trifles, they ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... the Squire in low life; and the gossip dealers in the village did not scruple to affirm that the likeness was not merely accidental; that Grenard Pike was brother to the Squire in a natural way; but whether this report were true or false, he and his master, if unrelated by blood, possessed ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had lost the medal. Sexual immorality was so rare that a single case in Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of the great war was disastrous. The Russians introduced beggary and prostitution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... Conduct. SECTION 7. No objectionable pictures shall be exhibited in the rooms where the Christian Science textbook is published or sold. No idle gossip, no slander, no mischief-making, no evil speaking ...
— Manual of the Mother Church - The First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts • Mary Baker Eddy
... this way more of the manners and customs of the inhabitants than would have been otherwise possible, gaining much information as to the haunts of the brigands, the whereabouts of the troops, and hearing much local gossip generally. The ignorance of the most respectable classes at this period was astounding; it has doubtless all changed since. I have been at a town of 2000 inhabitants, not one of whom took in a newspaper: the whole population, therefore, was in as profound ignorance of what was transpiring ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... Overton for me. Good-bye, Father. Take care of yourself. Remember to go for your walk every day, won't you? He's the nicest father," she said softly as the little group turned to leave the station after the train had gone. "Now take me to your house and let us have an old-fashioned gossip. I have so much to tell you, and I ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... he had covered that morning. He had been accustomed to reach her in fifteen minutes, and the suggestion that she go back to the old place began to look more reasonable, yet he hesitated and was reluctant to let a breath of gossip touch his future wife. Whether Elizabeth were right or wrong did not enter into ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... scandalous episodes of private life, and using them as the foundation of his romance. The fictitious name of Vaudrey has been held to cloak that of such and such a Minister of State. Those, however, who search for vulgar gossip in this book, or who look for private scandal are far astray. They are quite mistaken as regards the tendency and moral of Monsieur Claretie's book. The Vaudrey of the romance is no minister in particular, neither this statesman nor that. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... brilliant woman, this friend of Burr's; one whom many sought; but it was not this which influenced him. She had been his best friend, and had taken him into her own home during the darkest hour of his life, when condemnation was everywhere. Gossip had fluttered, but to no avail. Burr never forgot a friend, and in this case it was more than friendship: it was a genuine love that lasted; for years later, in his old age and hers as well, old Jumel mansion made gay at ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Pitt attained the premiership—coincidentally a good, ripe, marriageable age. Still, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a stiffish order, even allowing four long years to fill it; and undoubtedly Miss Boke's bit of gossip added somewhat to the already ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... and bright-eyed and graceful always, lope over the brown needles, intent upon some urgent business of their own. Noisy little chipmunks sit up and nibble nervously at dainties they have found, and flirt their tails and gossip, and scold the carping bluejays that peer down from overhanging branches. Perhaps a hoot owl in the hollow trees overhead opens amber eyes and blinks irritatedly at the chattering, then wriggles his head farther down into his feathers, stretches a leg and ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... remembered by attending mass in the morning, and by amusements in the afternoon. No public-house, with its glittering lights within, with its bright and cosy fire, and with its grand display of mirrors and pictures, invites the peasant to step inside and gossip about his neighbours, while sipping the genial juice of the grape, or the fire-water that gives to the eye a supernatural brightness, and to the tongue a rush of foolish language. There is no law against such houses, but there ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... was waiting for a cue—any cue served the Colonel, weather, politics, finance, everything but morals and gossip, these he never discussed, launched out in his inimitable way describing the varied kinds of weather indigenous to his part of the State: the late spring frosts with consequent damage to the peach crop; the heat ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... She was lost coming home in the channel. The captain was taken up by a coaster from Eye, loaded with cheese—" [Now, pray, what did parson Prunello say? This is a pattern of Mrs. Nickleby's rambling gossip.] ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... good deal of Philosophical gossip during my convalescence. On my last evening in hospital especially, there ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... fired a volley at the unsuspecting workmen he crossed the canyon to where a cub engineer was peering through a transit. The superintendent had overheard a scrap of gossip among the staff one evening before Weir's arrival when they were discussing the advent of the ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... out,—nay, before the setting of two suns—every gossip along the Riva—and they about covered the population—had become convinced that Loretta was lost to the Quarter. Unless a wedding ring was to end it all Vittorio would never be so bold in his attentions to Loretta, as to walk home with her ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 1778, as "a very beautiful verse, proper to characterize M. Franklin and to serve as an inscription for his portrait." These Memoirs, as is well known, are the record of conversations and news gathered in the circle of that venerable Egeria of gossip;[30] and here is evidence of the publicity which this welcome had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... drives out without any female chaperon beside her in the carriage. Well, if she had one, they would probably find some other malicious thing to say. Paris has become like a little country town in its gossip." ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... gentlemen's gentlemen are called in their private circles, was a frequent and welcome guest at some of the very highest tables in this town. He was a member of two influential clubs in Mayfair and Pimlico; and he was thus enabled to know the whole gossip of the town, and entertain his master very agreeably during the two hours' toilet conversation. He knew a hundred tales and legends regarding persons of the very highest ton, whose valets canvass their august secrets, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... knew a chap that had a cattle outfit near the Mexican border, so I dropped in on him one day and stayed two weeks. You see, he was lonely. Had a passion for theatres and hadn't seen a play for five years. My second-hand gossip was rather a godsend. But finally I got tired of talking about Mary Mannering, and decided to start north again. He bade me good-by on a little hill near his place. 'See here!' he said suddenly, looking toward the west. 'If you go a trifle out ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... grimly, "and by a couple of yellow journals. I didn't think you'd believe all the gossip and scandal that's been printed about me. I didn't believe ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... gentlemen, I don't mean no affront upon my soul; but I have stood the nonsense before now, and been flung—but I von't be sarved out in that there way any more. I am up to the gossip, and expects you'll come down ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "There's gossip enough about now, and they seem to have tumbled to it that you're our client. The office has been besieged this morning. Sorry, Ned, I'm busy," he went on, to a man who tried to catch his arm. "See you later, Fred. I'll be in after ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... published by men in business, and the wares they carry are those in demand: mostly gossip, scandal and defamation. And humanity is of such a quality that it is not scandalized or shocked by facts, but by the recital of the facts in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... endless flats—for the mountains had vanished now, and nothing broke the level of the sand—mademoiselle's gaiety went from her. Silent was the lively, chattering tongue that knew the jargon of cities, the gossip of the Plage. She was oppressed. Tahar rode close at her side. He seemed to have taken her under his special protection. Far before them rode the attendants, chanting deep love songs in the sun. The sound of those songs seemed like the sound of the great desert singing of its wild and savage ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... is seen more in innocent and childish exaggeration than in vicious distortion. It is the vice of untutored minds to run to gossip and make miracles of the matter-of-fact. The Negro also tells falsehoods from excess of good nature. He promises to do a piece of work on a certain day, because it is so much easier and pleasanter to say Yes, and stay away, than it is to ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... ensure peace or an armistice. I went this morning into a shop, the proprietor of which, a bootmaker, I have long known, and I listened with interest to the conversation of this worthy man with some of his neighbours who had dropped in to have a gossip, and to congratulate him on his martial achievements, as he had been on guard in a bastion. We first discussed why the Army of the Loire had not arrived, and we came to the conclusion that it was engaged in rallying Bazaine. "I should like to read your English newspapers now," said ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Sofia, Marya learnt that the court was at the summer palace of Tzarskoe-Selo, and at once resolved to stop there. She was able to get a lodging at the post-house, and the postmaster's wife, who was a regular gossip, began to tell her all the routine of the palace, at what hour the tzarina rose, had her coffee, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... foreign parts, cannot be considered otherwise than as a group, and merely with generic features. He had a Frau von Kamecke for Head Governess,—the lady whom Wilhelmina, in her famed Memoires, always writes KAMKEN; and of whom, except the floating gossip found in that Book, there is nothing to be remembered. Under her, as practical superintendent, SOUS-GOUVERNANTE and quasi-mother, was the Dame de Roucoulles, a more important person for us here. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... next morning professionally, and stayed some time talking with her. But nothing resulted from the visit beyond the assurance that she had not yet made any progress toward the discovery of my secret. I almost marvelled at this, so universal had been the gossip about my visits to Sark in connection with the breaking-off of my engagement to Julia. But that had occurred in the spring, and the nine-days' wonder had ceased before my patient came to the island. Still, any accidental conversation might give her the information, and open up a favorable chance ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... excursions on the water so thoroughly that he was already growing slightly forgetful of his purpose and satisfied that he could enjoy himself a few weeks without the zest of artistically redeeming the face of Ida Mayhew. But one day, while at dinner, he overheard some gossip concerning a "great belle" who was to come that evening, and he at once surmised that it was the fair stranger he had ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was—well, not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at intervals, and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... author's colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk—ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches upon some of the members of his circle—especially upon that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... failed on the instant to grasp the meaning of this piece of eloquent information, invited the urchin to repeat it, which he did with the sly unction of one proud of his secret. Mary laughed to herself. Some girls would have repressed the youthful gossip, but she was human. Somehow, too, the name ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... rich, says a gossip, only wear a suit once. There are others like that, only it is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... suspected of having had a hand. Mr. Hall was also reported, whether truly or falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's famous confraternity of Medmenham Abbey; and from this it was an easy step for gossip to advance to the assertion that the Rev. Mr. Sterne had himself been ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... I advised? This is my Red Sea. It can be no more terrible than the one which confronted Israel. Duty lies on the other side, and I am going over! 'Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.' The crimson waves of scandal, the white foam of gossip, shall part before me and heap themselves up as ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... they will do about it will be to make Esther miserable. They have begun to gossip already. A young man, even though he is a clergyman, can't be seen always in company with a pretty woman, without exciting remark. Only yesterday I was asked point-blank whether my niece ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... about the place and manner of Luther's birth originated in the seventeenth century. They were unknown in Luther's time. Generations after a great man has died gossip becomes busy and begins to relate remarkable incidents of his life. Lincoln did not say or do one half of the interesting things related about him. He has been drawn into that magical circle where myths ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... good-looking, and by repute were virtuous and easy of temper, but when I became acquainted with them I found that I must not expect from them any entertainment save the description of visits to the milliner, or schemes for parties, or the gossip of the country-side. I did not demand, Mr. Rambler, the critical acumen of Mrs. Montagu, or the erudition of Mrs. Carter, but I believe you will agree with me that a wife, and especially the wife of a clergyman and a scholar, should be able to read a page of Dr. Barrow's sermons ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti's for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities were more comforting to me just then than the consolations of religion could have been. I plunged into the midst of the conversation at once; chatted, laughed, and jested ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... time when the Wixon boy put Paris-green in the Trufants' well, because the oldest Trufant girl had given him the mitten, Marm Gossip gabbled in Smyrna until flecks of foam gathered in the corners of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... son. Remember that it is only to you that I can talk of him. Tell me all about his infancy and childhood. Tell me little anecdotes of him. I want to know more about him than the judge could tell me. I know old women love to gossip at great length of old times, so gossip away, Hannah—tell me everything. You shall have a ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... happy, safe, medium path between a gray and a gay life by keeping it radiant and bright. Read and think and talk of cheerful, hopeful, interesting subjects. Avoid small gossip, and be careful in your criticism of neighbors. Sometimes we must criticise, but speak to people whose faults you feel a word of counsel may amend, not of ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... smooth and well worn sod, Cross-path'd with every gossip's foot is trod; By cottage door where playful children run, And cats and curs sit basking in the sun: Where o'er the earthen seat the thorn is bent, Cross-arm'd, and back to wall, poor William leant. His bonnet broad drawn ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... something fragrant here, something that infected the soul, something of old faiths and old holy aspirations, a murmur and a perfume of trust and love. There might be gossip, trickling jealousies in this little world, mean actions, even, perhaps, ugly desires and ugly fulfilments of desire. Rosamund scarcely noticed, or did not notice, these things. With her people were at their best. That night, when Beattie was going ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Vansen. Gossip! Let the duke alone. The old cat looks as though he had swallowed devils, instead of mice, and could not now digest them. Let him alone, I say; he must eat, drink, and sleep, like other men. I am ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... another, according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is rather ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... was the thing that distinguishes the creative from other artists, the living, vivifying expression of something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity. If this book were to be an accurate record of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... for breakfast with Miss Briggs. The arrival of Mrs. Bute, which would not have caused any extreme delight at another period, was hailed with pleasure now; Miss Crawley being pleased at the notion of a gossip with her sister-in-law regarding the late Lady Crawley, the funeral arrangements pending, and Sir ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the men were listening to gossip about their colleagues in the Cafe Cardinal across the way. Ambroise alone sat apart and patted and smoothed the salt in its receptacles. He was a young man from some little town in Alsace, a furious patriot, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... occupants of the gambling-room were, for the most part, house employees who were waiting for business to begin. The majority of these employees were gathered about the faro layout, where the cards were being run in a perfunctory manner to an accompaniment of gossip and reminiscence. The sight of Ben Miller in company with a girl evoked some wonder. This wonder increased to amazement when Miller ordered the dealer out of his seat; it became open-mouthed when the girl took his place, then broke a new deck of cards, deftly ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... soldiers went into town, smartened up. Albert knew a fair number of the boys round about; there would be plenty of gossip in the market-place, plenty of lounging in groups on the Bath Road, watching the Saturday evening shoppers. Then a modest drink or two, and the movies. They passed an agreeable, casual, nothing-in-particular evening, with which Joe was quite satisfied. He thought of Belbury ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... is in old books. Moreover, he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called The Transcendentalist, as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. So much for our gossip of today. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... knew, he averred, was the gossip of the village that the pig was dead, and that somebody would have to die for it. It was all right, he said, in reply to a query from the steward. It was the custom. Whenever a loved pig died its owners were in custom bound to go out and kill somebody, anybody. Of course, it was better ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... early. He meant to have a frolicsome, teasing chat with her, for the doctor had laid it down that light conversation would assist the cure of traumatic neurasthenia. She would not be asleep, and even if she were asleep she would be glad to awaken, because she admired his style of gossip when both of them were in the vein for it. He would describe for her the evening at the studio humorously, in such a fashion as to confirm her in her righteous belief that the misguided Sissie had seen the maternal wisdom ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... and solemnly elected each other. With these and many more local particulars, extracted from all sorts and conditions of men in and about the hotel, Allan whiled away the weary time in his own essentially desultory manner, until the gossip died out of itself, and Midwinter (who had been speaking apart with the landlord) quietly recalled him to the matter in hand. The finest coast scenery in the island was said to be to the westward and the southward, and there was a fishing town in those regions called Port St. Mary, with ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Duke of Bedford attacked it first with great spirit and mastery, but had little support, though the Duke of Newcastle did not vote. The lawyers were all ordered to purse it through our House: but except the poor Attorney-general,(390) "Who is nurse indeed. to all intents and purposes, and did amply gossip over it, not one of them said a word. Nugent shone extremely in opposition to the bill, and, though every now and then on the precipice of absurdity, kept clear of it, with great humour and wit and argument, and was unanswered-yet we were beat. Last Monday it came into the committee: Charles ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... At last Martha went downstairs to the kitchen to see about something, but when it was seen about she could not refrain from having a gossip with the landlady's servant, never dreaming that the children could get into mischief; ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... thanks with a smile, she sat down familiarly on his desk, and they plunged into a vein of social gossip. ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Boccaccio need hardly trouble himself to know Margaret of Navarre. The second is that it is a loose if not obscene book, disgraceful for a lady to have written (or at least mothered), and not very creditable for any one to read. The third is that it is interesting as the gossip of a certain class of modern newspapers is interesting, because it tells scandal about distinguished personages, and has for its interlocutors other distinguished personages, who can be identified without much difficulty, and the identification of whom adds zest to the reading. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the end of the week of the maddest orgie which had taken place at the Fontonka house. It sounded like a phantasmagoria in which unclothed dancers, and wild beasts, and unheard-of feats seemed to float about. And the Princess sighed as she refuted the gossip ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... news of the Auld Laird's death reached the village, and on the following Sabbath there was not an empty seat in the kirk, for every one was anxious to hear the latest gossip about the event which meant so much to every one in the region. There was no newspaper in the village, and the news of the week was passed about by word of mouth in the kirkyard after service, or on week days was retailed over the counter at the village post-office, which was ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... once seized with a fatal attack of home-sickness. Shedding a few tears natural—to it ("'Tis so, and the tears of it are wet"), it died ("and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates"). Such is the theory, annotated by Mark Antony's immortal after-dinner gossip, on the emotions and natural history of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... in the Gramercy neighborhood. Within its high iron railings the little park had put on its smart coat of vernal green, and was admiring itself in its fountain mirror. Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... flux de mots [Fr.]; copia verborum [Lat.], cacoethes loquendi [Lat.]; furor loquendi [Lat.]; verbosity &c (diffuseness) 573; gift of the gab &c (eloquence) 582. talker; chatterer, chatterbox; babbler &c v.; rattle; ranter; sermonizer, proser^, driveler; blatherskite [U.S.]; gossip &c (converse) 588; magpie, jay, parrot, poll, Babel; moulin a paroles [Fr.]. V. be loquacious &c adj.; talk glibly, pour forth, patter; prate, palaver, prose, chatter, prattle, clack, jabber, jaw; blather, blatter^, blether^; rattle, rattle on; twaddle, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... truth if you butt in and try to straighten it, and the Lord knows that Ellen's too good a cook and too much needed in this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings with investigating any of Mrs. O'Hern's yarns. Just you refuse to listen to servants' gossip. If you'd been a little less of a darling, inexperienced school-girl, you'd have cut off such talk at the first words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best of—" he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself, blinding and dazzling Lydia with the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... them) sat gossiping in a treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,—like the traditional militia company, all officers. They did not gossip, of course (it is the male that sports the red), but they ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember. The old risk of prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left with one's drama, one's disaster, on one's hands, because there was nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying. As Susy watched the two people before her, each so frankly unaffected by her presence, Violet Melrose ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... heavens!" said Sam. He had heard of hazing before, but he had been living in such a realm of imagination for the past weeks that the gossip had never really reached his consciousness, and now that he was confronted with the reality he hardly ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... with scissors, pin-cushion and keys hanging from their girdle, outside of their dress; and reaching the neighbor's house the visitors industriously used knitting needles and tongues at the same time. The village gossip was talked over; neighbors' affairs settled, and the stockings finished by tea-time, when the important meal appeared on the ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... too?" Snowball hesitated. He did not like to gossip about family matters, but it was a friend of the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... spent—and such an evening! If an exclamation point cannot imply its happiness it must remain a mystery. Long after he had bade his earnest "good-night," Honor and her guardian sat together over the dying coals and chatted pleasantly. It was their custom to hold this nightly gossip no matter at how late an ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... speak ill of any one or to gossip of other people's affairs. At the same time do not forget ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... civilly, that she could not undertake to go backwards and forwards to a room half a mile off. It would be a waste of time. Besides, though it was probably not the case in that particular meeting, she had heard that there was often a great deal of gossip going on at such places. The visitor was determined not to be offended, and she replied, gently, that there was no chance of gossip, for, after a certain time had been given to the actual business of the meeting, such as planning, cutting out, and apportioning work, one of the ladies ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... their purpose. The old librarian of the town library had taken note of all the books he carried to his master, and asked about his studies and pursuits. Paolo found it hard to understand his English, apparently, and answered in the most irrelevant way. The leading gossip of the village tried her skill in pumping him for information. It was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in the house," said Sarah, in a cold, low voice. Then John Mangam looked up with some show of animation. He had heard the gossip. ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... Then as he spoke to the doctor, requesting him to hurry at once to Mrs. Dempster's, the curiosity of the bystanders became intense. They would have something to discuss among themselves, and a choice bit of gossip would soon be in circulation ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... the little crowd dispersed, and the baby, with its brace of mothers, gone to bed, the new friends sat cozily down and enjoyed an hour or two of feminine gossip, exchanged kisses, cards, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... refuted all these charges—gossip travels in circles in small towns and sooner or later reaches those most concerned—"Aaron lazy! I-to-goodness no! Why, he's old and what for should he go out and work every day, I wonder. He helps me with the garden and so, and when I go out to help somebody for a day or two he gets ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... Napoleon's instructions, his brothers were to prevent the empress and the King of Rome from falling into the hands of the enemy. De Baussue narrates this scene in his memoirs, and it is self-evident that it was not so stormy as the gossip of Paris portrayed it.] ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... out a definite time. When it was not too cold she sat in St. James' Park. But the rest of the day she spent quite happily on her sofa, reading one novel after another or chatting with the landlady; she had an inexhaustible interest in gossip, and told Philip with abundant detail the history of the landlady, of the lodgers on the drawing-room floor, and of the people who lived in the next house on either side. Now and then she was seized with panic; she poured out her fears to Philip ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to come here and look after him in this emergency. She would have done this anyway, but she knew how Marcellin and his assistant and even Nurse Duval would have made her pay for her act—an act based upon nothing but decent loyalty and honest responsibility. Raised eyebrows—gossip in the air—covert smiles—the whole detestable atmosphere of intrigue with which they would have surrounded her, had vanished as by a spell before the magic word fiancee. She was breathing ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... shall be generous too. If thou hast any little fancies that way, thou must write and tell me. Oh, mon fils, thou wilt write often, and I must know all the news. I do hear that Darthea Peniston is in thy aunt's house a good deal, and Madam Ferguson, the gossip, would have me believe thou carest for her, and that Arthur Wynne is taken in the same net. I liked her. I did not tell thee that thy Aunt Gainor left her with me for an hour while she went into King street ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... began to gossip. "Why, to Huntercombe Hall. What! haven't you heard, Mrs. Meyrick? Master caught a robber last night. Laws! you should have seen him: he have got crape all over his face; and master, and the constable, and Mr. Musters, they be all gone with him to Sir Charles, for to have him ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Anderson, "I'll go, Tom; but, to be plain with you, I do not think that I can be of much use there. I have been several times: she will gossip as long as you please; but if you would talk seriously, she turns a deaf ear. You see, Tom, there's little to be gained when you have to contend with such a besetting sin as avarice. It is so powerful, especially in old age, that it absorbs ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... did not care to talk about individual cases, and I felt that the rule was a safe one, to prevent Eugenics from becoming Gossip. Kennedy thanked him for his courtesy, and we left apparently on the best of terms both with Crafts and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... it portended success, except one Lysimachus, who said that he feared that, as places struck by thunderbolts may not be walked over, Heaven might mean to signify to Pyrrhus by this that he never should set foot in the city. Pyrrhus however answered that this was mere empty gossip, and that they had better take their arms in their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... importance of private recollections. The gossip of one epoch forms part of the history of the next. It is therefore to be deplored that those whose more or less obscure lives run their course in the shadow of some public career are seldom ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... I know he can't bear me, nor any one else, even you, though you fancy that he has a high opinion of you. Worse still with Alyosha, he despises Alyosha. But he doesn't steal, that's one thing, and he's not a gossip, he holds his tongue, and doesn't wash our dirty linen in public. He makes capital fish pasties too. But, damn him, is he worth talking ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Wingfield, heard the news to-day on this very Thursday in the Bungay market-place, whither I went to gossip and to sell the apples which these dreadful gales have left me, as they hang upon ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... Fra Rinaldo lies with his gossip: her husband finds him in the room with her; and they make him believe that he was curing his godson of worms by ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... sent to the wrong pay-clerk. It had really come, but through some mistake, had been sent to Mr. Notter, and was by him expended in payment of his own district, when it should have been paid on the Caharagh line. "But these stories," he added, "received in gossip, are turned against the Board of Works." It is not very clear what this official meant by stories, but there is one thing plain enough in the matter: Mr. Notter's men must have been in arrear of their ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... smoking-room; Dolores and Ethel were in the state-room of the latter, holding one of those long important feminine conferences—most delightful, I understood, to themselves—in which dress was the piece de resistance, with perhaps a little gossip about Ethel's conquests in Aquazilia; they were legion! Mrs. Darbyshire was asleep in her state-room, and as for the dear old man, Don Juan, whom I looked upon now as my future father-in-law, he was studying assiduously a book he had picked up in the ship's library, ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... knew what she meant, and to a certain extent I could understand, if not sympathize with her. Her husband, Martin Ogleby, club-man and man about town, had a reputation none too savoury. But, man-like, I knew, he would condone not even the appearance of anything that caused gossip in his wife's actions. I could understand ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... my speech. I, as you know full well, do not care for gossip in the bath nor for reclining long over a banquet. In the pauses of my work I am alone, with myself and with you, my very worthy Leukippe. So the hours of rest are not for me the fairest scenes, but empty waits between the acts of the drama of life; and no reasonable man can find fault with me for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... away industriously under Mr. Strather's supervision, until the Academy sitting was suspended. It would have been well for him if he had gone home as soon as he laid down his brushes. But in an evil hour be lingered after the studies of the evening were over, to have a gossip with the prize-fighting Model; and in an indiscreet moment he consented to officiate as one of the patrons at an exhibition of sparring, to be held that night in a neighboring ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... had come into his own at last, and was a hero, for the story of his long ill-luck was common gossip now, and men praised him for his courage. He had never been praised for anything before and was uncertain ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... matronly monkeys, chattered and gossiped about her private affairs. And, as she clasped her little son to her, with her mother's heart swelling with love and pride, she thought, with pleasurable anticipation, of the surprise and gossip there would be in the morning when the wonderful ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... he said at last, 'it was a foolish woman's gossip that Henry ought to have quashed; but that is no reason you ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... instant to grasp the meaning of this piece of eloquent information, invited the urchin to repeat it, which he did with the sly unction of one proud of his secret. Mary laughed to herself. Some girls would have repressed the youthful gossip, but she was human. Somehow, too, ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... dinners, those ambrosial nights! If the weather was kind, of course, we would begin our session on the terrasse, sipping our vermouth, puffing our cigarettes, laughing our laughs, tossing hither and thither our light ball of gossip, vaguely conscious of the perpetual ebb and flow and murmur of people in the Boulevard, while the setting sun turned Paris to a marvellous water-colour, all pale lucent tints, amber and alabaster and mother-of-pearl, with amethystine shadows. Then, one by one, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... good work, if we would, selecting one, give it a little attention, and by easy process proceed to learn it. As it is, in general society the man or woman who has any special pursuit, accomplishment, or real interest for leisure hours, beyond idle gossip and empty time-killing, is a great exception. And yet I sincerely believe that in perhaps a majority of cases there is a sincere desire to do something, which is killed by simple ignorance of the fact that with a very little trouble ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... it is customary for the daily papers to publish a column or so of society gossip. They generally head it "Chit-Chat," or "On Dit," or "Le Boudoir," or something of the sort, and they keep it pretty full of French terms to give it the proper sort of swing. These columns may be very interesting in their way, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... friend does understand that he has wronged me; that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... 'Gossip Ass,' replied the Dog, 'leave me alone to guard the premises. I can do it, if I choose; but the truth is, this master of ours thinks himself so safe lately that he clean forgets me, and I don't find my allowance of food ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... she had explained to the officers, that she was alone on the premises—her mistress had been called away upon sudden business—but if they would take the ups with the downs. . . . Then, her curiosity overcoming her—for, of course, she had heard gossip of the doctor's intentions—"And which of you," she asked, "is he going to marry, ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... losses up and down the line. All this was bad enough, but by the end of five weeks of Murphy's attachment to the payroll he had demonstrated that he was not only incapable, indolent, careless, and unreliable, but that he was a disorganizer, a gossip, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... whose wives were "in the States," or responsible middle-aged leaders of the town. In the elaborate toilettes of the women, as compared with the less formal business suits of the men, there was an odd mingling of the social attitude with perhaps more mysterious confidences. The idle gossip about them had never affected Barker; rather he had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding, and he scarcely glanced at the different couples in his progress through the room. He did not even notice ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... hat and blew a kiss to her. A thrill of exultation ran through him. He had not expected her to meet him at the landing. Her mere presence there was evidence of a determination to defy not only her mother but also to brave the storm of gossip that was bound to attend this public demonstration of loyalty on her part, for none knew so well as he how the townspeople looked upon their attachment. A most satisfying promise for the future, he gloated; here was the proof that ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... hours. Sacobie Bear was a great gossip for one of his race. In fact, he had a Micmac nickname which, translated, meant "the man who deafens his friends with much talk." Archer, however, was pleased with his ready chatter ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... due to his being, for several years, the president of the Royal Society. I would willingly say much more, but I am unable to write authoritatively upon the life and work of such a man, and must leave gossip to the daily press. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... The explosion of the hand-grenade; shattered hopes and happiness.—A winter evening's gossip at the Aubrey Arms, among Yatton villagers, and ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Ere Jane's long gossip was ended, her favorite's fears were wholly banished. With a hug for thanks and farewell, Glory was off and away, and the tired eyes of the toilers in the Lane brightened as she flitted past their dingy windows, waving ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... thing is certainly true. It is not a mere bit of gossip. We have it from Frederick himself. His sister had a letter from him yesterday, in which he tells us of it, and he had just had it in a letter from Harville, written upon the spot, from Uppercross. I fancy they ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... worth while to dress, if you shall meet Macaulay, or Hallam, or Guizot, or Thiers, or Landseer, or Delaroche,—Mrs. Norton, the Misses Berry, Madame Recamier, and all the brilliant women and famous foreigners. But why should we desert the pleasant pages of those men, and the recorded gossip of those women, to be squeezed flat against a wall, while young Doughface pours oyster gravy down our shirt front, and Carolina Pettitoes wonders ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... people's mere gossip and idle talk pass into history. In all the memoirs of the time if you read them you will find it stated that our envoy had a warning from some highly placed woman who was in love with him. Of course it's known that he had successes with women, and in the ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... resent these intrusions of the Mexican woman, but of late she had begun to tolerate them. Her day was long and cheerless at the best, and there was no one to talk to. Trina even fancied that old Miss Baker had come to be less cordial since their misfortune. Maria retailed to her all the gossip of the flat and the neighborhood, and, which was much more interesting, told her ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the insatiable gold fountain-pen from whence our indefatigable Lady Correspondent derived her literary pseudonym, was employed in recording merest gossip, in the absence of the longed-for opportunity for its wielder to prove herself the equal, if not the superior, of Dora Corr. Dora was the woman Lady Hannah admired and envied above all others. Colonial ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... had foreseen, tongues did wag—those tongues of the countryside, avid of anything that might spice the tedium of dull lives and brains. And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton's ears, no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings, Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex. This dearth developed her reserve, kept her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... distraught, and the Hardwick servants had seized the occasion to run out for a bit of delectable gossip in which the least of the horrors included Gray Stoddard's murdered and mutilated body washed down in some mountain stream to the ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... of Spain from their necks," and when they were not fighting men they fought the waters. Truly the history of their struggles is a wondrous one! None of these was in sight, however, as we strolled the streets, but we did disturb the chat or gossip of two delightful, apple cheeked old ladies in white caps, who became dumb with astonishment at the sight of two foreigners who walked about gazing up at the roofs and windows of the houses, and at the mynheer ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... worthy Peechy Prauw paused to take breath, and to take a sip of the gossip tankard that stood at his elbow. His auditors remained with open mouths and outstretched necks, gaping like a nest of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... yet I am just as well pleased that my son and heir should be born in England. Doctor, there is another thing I wish to say. I know perfectly well what these little country towns are—everything is a source of gossip and sensation. If it were known that such an incident as this had happened to me, the papers would be filled with it; and it might fall out that my father, the earl, would come to know of it before ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... steps of the church and at the horse sheds back of it. Particularly did the women gather about Aunt Prudence and Sheila. As for the men, both young and old, the newcomer's city ways and unmistakable beauty gave them much to gossip about. Several of the younger masculine members of Elder Minnett's congregation came almost to blows over the settlement of who should take the fly cloth off Queenie, back her around, and lead her out to the front ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the whole shameful story, every word, from my lightning vision to my gossip with Marcel in the antechamber, he listening in hopeless silence. At length I finished. It seemed hours since he had spoken. At last he said, "Then it is true." The grayness of his face drew the cry ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... Hill. Every inhabitant, or at least every householder, had to contribute his share of straw to the pile; a recusant was looked at askance, and if in the course of the year he happened to break a leg or lose a child, there was not a gossip in the village but knew the reason why. At nightfall the whole male population, men and boys, mustered on the top of the hill; the women and girls were not allowed to join them, but had to take up their position at a certain spring ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... cataloguing people, I should like to get our doctor tabulated. If Jervis knows any gossip about him, write it to me, please; the worse, the better. He called yesterday to lance a felon on Sammy Speir's thumb, then ascended to my electric-blue parlor to give instructions as to the dressing of thumbs. The duties of ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... that there must have been, judging from this example, in "high places" some "indiscretions" and "unpleasant" gossip early in our history. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... worn-out clothes of their husbands, or fabricated petticoats for themselves and such of the children as had grown old enough to require such garments. But besides these occupations, they spent a portion of their time in prattling gossip, which, whatever the subject might be, was always accompanied with a great deal of merriment and hearty laughter. They also spent no small portion of their time in the sea, for bathing was one of the favourite amusements of ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... the squire more carefully, and suddenly cried out: "Holy Mary be good to me! Isn't it Tom Cecial, my neighbor and gossip!" ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... had been busy with the wife of the Richest Trustee—as the widow she did not relax her hold. What the trustees said that day they only repeated from gossip: the little gray wisp of a woman was a nonentity—nothing more—with the spirit of a mouse. She held no position in society, and what she did with her time or her money no one knew. The trustees smiled ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... we'll scare up a ghost or something." Then she looked around the room—four girls and Nolan—Nolan, who had edged with alacrity toward Eveley on the telephone desk—and Kitty shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, what's the use? Never mind. Go on with the gossip, Eveley. I can think with ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, [Footnote: Erudition: learning, scholarship.] for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... you believe it!" (addressing the general group) "this ridiculous fellow kindly offered to see me up the hill and gossip along the way—gossip! though he refused point-blank to come in and watch the rehearsal. But when he found there wasn't to be any, he changed about like a weather-vane. So here he is, claiming to have been away ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Local gossip suggests perceptible rivalry between the stately palace of the King and the pink palace on the hill, in which Margherita holds her state with not less ceremony than that observed at the Court of the Quirinale. It is a beautiful thing for a country to have in it a woman of high position, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... in heaven, ma'am, that's not true. I made no pretence; and I thought in reason you would know why I had come. This gossip—" ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... gods, has been recognised in many a dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint James the Apostle have appeared—preferably on white horses—in sundry battles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip and revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and no one outside the Zaouia knew of the great man's death until days afterwards, when he was already buried. Even in the Zaouia it was not known by many that he had gone away or returned from a journey, or that he lay ill. In spite of this secrecy and mystery, however, there was no gossip, but only wild wailing, of mourners who refused to be comforted. And if certain persons, to the number of twenty or more, were missing from their places in the Zaouia, nothing was said, after Si Maieddine had talked with the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... strolling by the window at evening, and strumming on the banjo,—the only vestige of tropical life that haunts our busy Northern zone. But he liked just as well to note the ways of well-dressed girls and boys at croquet parties, or to sit at the club window and hear the gossip. He was a jewel of a listener, and was not easily bored even when Philadelphians talked about families, or New Yorkers about bargains, or Bostonians about books. A man who has not one absorbing aim can get a great many miscellaneous ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... thanks, dear," Mrs. Linden would say, and, thinking remorsefully of that little feminine gossip at the Crane mansion, would redouble her efforts in the young girl's behalf. Mrs. Linden had a fear which amounted to presentiment, that the aforementioned clique, of which Mrs. Crane was the acknowledged leader, would learn, by some means, ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... good gossip," said Miss Mapp effusively. "Such an interest she has in other people's affairs. So human and sympathetic. I'm sure our dear hostess told her all about her adventures ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... was not quite so private as it might have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London without troubling himself to solve mysteries which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... to the cardinal that she was fast getting into the Queen's good graces, by virtue of being a capital gossip and story-teller; and that she had frequent private audiences. Soon she added intimations that the Queen was far from being really so displeased with the cardinal, as he supposed. At this the old fool bit instantly, and showed the keenest emotions ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... pleasantly, whether we read them in the quaint French of the fourteenth century, or in the more modern French in which they have just been clothed by M. Natalis de Wailly. So vividly does the easy gossip of the old soldier bring before our eyes the days of St. Louis and Henry III., that we forget that we are reading an old chronicle, and holding converse with the heroes of the thirteenth century. The fates both of Joinville's "Memoires" and of Joinville himself suggest in fact many reflections ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... warehouse was built by Major Carter, on the bank of the lake, between Meadow and Spring streets, and this was speedily followed by another, built by Elias and Harvey Murray, which became the centre of business and gossip for the village and the country round about. Of course a full supply of the great ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... relieved"—from the command of the Department of the South, there was a report current in those parts of a conversation, perhaps imaginary, between President Lincoln and the relieved General, on his arrival at Washington. The gossip ran, that on General Hunter's inquiring the cause of his removal, the good-natured President could only say that "Horace Greeley said he had found a man who could do the job." The job was the taking of Charleston, and the "coming man" was Brigadier-General (now Major-General) Gillmore. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... are above the chatter of a wretched spot, a narrow life. Down there, nothing is not ridiculed that is not some phase of a provinciality. The dances in certain houses, the faces of some conceited club, long-spun names, business or gossip, or to drive a double carriage, are the gaslight boundaries of existence! Pah! it is a courtyard, bounded by four square walls, a path or two to walk in, and the eyes of busybodies to order our doings and sneer us out of our souls. How they deny us that ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... one must meet in doing as I advised? This is my Red Sea. It can be no more terrible than the one which confronted Israel. Duty lies on the other side, and I am going over! 'Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.' The crimson waves of scandal, the white foam of gossip, shall part before me and heap themselves up as walls ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's Confessions to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs that ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... seen. Mr. Fairweather had been settled in the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip. All that he fully understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Capistrano nearly fifteen years after this episode in his life there. Two years after the robbery he heard that his loss was known to the mission. Pablo, while under the influence of too much aguardiente, had told of it. Father Zalvidea at once set to work to silence the gossip, and did so effectually, for he heard nothing more of it while he remained at the mission. But the rumor, lived, although repressed, and for years after his departure, searches were made for the money which many believed had never been stolen, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... bearing the title of The Mason's Arms, and is kept by Master Edward Honeyball, the "bully-rock" of the establishment. It is one of those little taverns which abound in the heart of the city and form the centre of gossip and intelligence of the neighborhood. We entered the barroom, which was narrow and darkling, for in these close lanes but few rays of reflected light are enabled to struggle down to the inhabitants, whose broad day is at best but a tolerable twilight. The room was partitioned into boxes, each ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... are certain, that she could then have had little idea that her chief home would be within its bounds. Even in 1831 transport and communication by land and water continued a tedious and troublesome business. However, the visit to the Isle of Wight was repeated in 1833. Perhaps to dissipate the gossip and calm the little irritation which had been created by the Princess's absence from the coronation, she made her appearance twice in public, on the completion of her thirteenth year, in 1832. That was a year in which there was ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... at breakfast he learned from his hostess that the presence of the strange gentleman lodging with her had been remarked by several young women, and that it was already the gossip of the Upper Town. In the course of her stream of news she mentioned Monsieur de Lery. The hand with which he was about to lift his cup to his lips stopped, and ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... people. Schiller is always in pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,—so lubricious in its suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he had become a libertine,—and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Tower of London. The names of several Volunteer Leaders are mentioned as being dead. But the surmise that steals timidly from one mouth flies boldly as a certitude from every mouth that repeats it, and truth itself would now be listened to with only a gossip's ear, but no person would believe a ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... aught that should do me a pleasure!" said Mistress Winter crustily. "Gossip Flint might have told me so much.— Take that, thou lither hussy! I'll learn thee to ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... face to point the way, Pendulous, blanched with longing, shedding flame Of silver on the brown grope of the flood. The stars are for me; the horizon wakes Its pilgrim chanting; and the little sand Grows musical of hope beneath my feet. The waves that leap to meet my swimming breast Gossip sweet secrets of the light-drenched way, And when the deep throbs of the rising surge Pulse upward with me, and a rain of wings Blurs round the moon's pale place, she stoops to reach Still welcome of bright hands across the wave, And sings low, low, globed ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... at once to whom she was referring, for he had heard the gossip of the youth of Monypenny, and he ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... behind him. When he sat down in a corner of the tavern office and lighted his pipe his subalterns showed him deference by leaving him to himself. That isolation gave Landlord Brophy his opportunity to indulge his bent in gossip ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... in the Emperor; for only by diminishing the dignity of the monarch could the revolutionary cause make headway. And during and after the change all the official documents, school textbooks, press views and social gossip have always coupled the word monarch with reprobation. Thus for a long while this glorious image has been lying in the dirty pond! Leaving out the question that it is difficult to restore the monarchy at ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... several botanists. It is probable that oxlips may be produced either from the cowslip or the primrose as the seed- bearer, but oftenest from the latter, as I judge from the nature of the stations in which oxlips are generally found (2/13. See also on this head Hardwicke's 'Science Gossip' 1867 pages 114, 137.), and from the primrose when crossed by the cowslip being more fertile than, conversely, the cowslip by the primrose. The hybrids themselves are also rather more fertile when crossed with the primrose than with the cowslip. ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... sooth, and had the donkey been in his house assuredly he would have lent it to me." But the owner of the animal said to himself, "Certainly Such-an-one begged it of me, but the rest is a lie, for the beast is shut up in the stable." However the Syrian who owned the beast went to his gossip, the man who had begged a loan of it, and entering the house salam'd to him and said, "Give me the donkey, O Such-an-one;"—And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of day and fell silent and ceased to say her permitted say. Then quoth her sister Dunyazad, "How sweet ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the representative of Pickle in Scott's generation, was a Highlander, and Pickle was not only a traitor, a profligate, an oppressor of his tenantry, and a liar, but (according to Jacobite gossip which reached 'King James') a forger of the King's name! Moreover he was, in all probability, one fountain of that reproach, true or false, which still clings to the name of the brave and gentle ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... of any age, with ready knowledge for whatever turn the conversation may take, and so abounding in resources as not even to be open to the temptation of making a display of them. The one can talk only so long as the conversation turns on dress, gossip, or the discussion of private character. In listening to the talk of such a woman, you hardly hear a sentence which is not based upon personalities. Her mind has not been fed and nurtured from day to day with beautiful and ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... presents the Chancellor in company with another port-loving lawyer, William Pitt, from whose fame, by-the-by, Lord Stanhope has recently removed the old disfiguring imputations of sottishness. "Returning," says Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, a poor authority, but piquant gossip-monger, "by way of frolic, very late at night, on horseback, to Wimbledon, from Addiscombe, the seat of Mr. Jenkinson, near Croydon, where the party had dined, Lord Thurlow, the Chancellor, Pitt, and Dundas, found the turnpike gate, situate between Tooting and Streatham, thrown open. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... for a minute. "No, I didn't mean that, only Pratt isn't the man to tell anything which isn't true, he's such a gossip," he answered. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... meant for girls; just to give them an opportunity of hobnobbing together, and talking gossip, and making ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... When I visit people whom I like, such as Madame de Sallus and yourself, I do not expect to meet the Paris that flutters from house to house in the evening, gossiping and scandalizing. I have had my experience of gossip and tittle-tattle. It needs only one of these talkative dames or men to take away all the pleasure there is for me in visiting the lady on whom I happen to have called. Sometimes when I am anchored perforce upon my ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... words into Anne's ears—swinging her parasol to and fro, and looking as if the merest gossip was dropping from her lips—with the dexterity which rarely fails a woman when she is called on to assist a deception in which her own interests are concerned. Cleverly as it had been done, however, Geoffrey's inveterate distrust was stirred into action by it. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... church services than the busy people of "the world." The sight of these little houses always oppressed me with a sense of my inferiority in the matter of devoutness. I could not imagine myself living in one of them, until I came across a group of their occupants engaged in discussing some racy gossip with the nuns on one of the doorsteps. Gossip is not my besetting weakness, but I felt relieved. Convents are not aristocratic institutions in Russia as they are in Roman Catholic countries, and very few ladies by birth and education ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... or genius has no sort of connection or kindred. It may be some oddity in the manner, or incident in the life, of the author that is whispered over before his book comes out. This often macadamizes the way to popularity, for gossip is a mighty spell in the literary world, and a concealment of the author's name often creates an anxiety in the public mind, for it leaves room for guesses and conjectures, and as some are very fond of ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... for yersel'. It's NO! And it's sae, I'm thinkin', wi' most of you who read the words I've written. Ye'll mind yer own affairs, and sae muckle o' yer neighbors as he's not able to keep ye from findin' oot when ye tak' the time for a bit gossip! ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... ——. We sat talking on the porch, watching the moon rise and flood the dew-wet fields with a tide of white radiance. Occasionally we heard Mr. or Mrs. Hopper in the lamp-lit sitting-room making brief comments on neighborhood gossip, or the crops, and then Mrs. Hopper would go on silently sewing, and "Pa," his white head bent over a "Farmer's Almanac," made long and painful calculations on a scrap of paper in which he seemed to get much mysterious assistance from ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... shoulders derisively, and hurried off to their associates, to gossip with them about ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... so keenly and so well could paint The village-folk, with all their humors quaint,— The parson ambling on his wall-eyed roan, Grave and erect, with white hair backward blown,— The tough old boatman, half amphibious grown,— The muttering witch-wife of the gossip's tale, And the loud straggler levying his black mail,— Old customs, habits, superstitions, fears, All that lies buried under fifty years. To thee, as is most fit, I bring my lay, And, grateful, own the debt I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... daughter of the Countess Voig, whose name chances to be Elizabeth. She was educated at a convent in Antwerp, and the countess has lived in that city for several years, in order to be nearer her daughter. There was some gossip here that the young lady had married in Antwerp, just after leaving the convent; but we know little of the life of the Voigs because they are very reserved. Two or three months ago they returned to their castle, which is four miles to the north of Charleroi, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... bridge the Jhelum broadens out into a stately river, controlled at one side by the banked walk known as the Bund, with the Club House upon it and the line of houseboats beneath. Here the visitors flutter up and down and exchange the gossip, the bridge appointments, the little dinners that sit so incongruously on the pure ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... sigh, "for she is just the companion for life that I longed for. Where could I find so intelligent an intellect and so pure a mind, united with such radiant beauty, so different from the women of society, who live but for dress and gossip. Has Sabine anything in common with those giddy girls who look upon life as a perpetual value, and who take a husband as they do a partner, because they cannot dance without one? How her face lighted up as she spoke of him, and how thoroughly she puts ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Do any of us? God forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... know and he's always been an unusually dependable boy, especially to us who know him well. He'll come back all right. What? Oh, Mrs. Carter! No, I haven't heard any such reports, but I'm sure they're just gossip. You know how people will talk. What do you say? They phoned you from Economy? Who? The police? They asked for Mark? Well, I wouldn't let that worry you. Mark always was helpful to the police in finding people, or going with them after a lost car, you know. I wouldn't worry. Who? Billy? ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... don't really see why you should be so severe on him for going his own way. You are yourself doing so without, I fancy, much deference to your parents' opinions, and besides I have heard you many a time rail against the soullessness of the conversation and the gossip and tittle-tattle of society in country towns, meaning in your case in Abchester, and should, therefore, be the last to blame him for revolting ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the room of the old War Department, second floor, next to the corner room occupied by the Secretary of War, with a door of communication. While we were at work it was common for General Grant and, afterward, for Mr. Stanton to drop in and chat with us on the social gossip of the time. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... offices were filled with scouts; boys cleaning boots and knives; bed-makers emptying slops and tattling scandal; scullions peeling potatoes and listening; and the butchers' and green-grocers' men who supply the college, and loitering about to gossip and get a taste of the college ale before going about their business. The room was large, but low and close, and the floor uneven. The furniture did not add to the cheerfulness of the apartment. It consisted of one large table in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Recovering himself, he laid a large hand on the priest's shoulder, and, his face assuming its wonted smile, said in his usual low tone, "Amigo, it seems that you have a penchant for spreading gossip. Think you I am ignorant of the fact that because of it Rome spewed you out for a meddlesome pest? Do you deceive yourself that Cartagena will open her ears to your garbled reports? The hag, Marcelena, lies! She has long hoped to gain some advantage from ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... country, and was a kind father to his boys.... 'What more should a woman expect?' Margaret asked herself, thinking of her father's words and enumerating her blessings. Three healthy children, a home and enough to eat and wear, a husband who (in spite of Conny's gossip) neither drank to excess nor was unfaithful nor beat her,—who had none of the obvious vices of the male! Good God! Margaret sighed with a bitter ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... he became editor of the Ladies Home Journal, was conducting a weekly syndicate column under the title of "Bok's Literary Leaves." It usually consisted of news and gossip of writers, comment, etc., literary odds and ends, and occasional interviews with distinguished authors. He went up to Hartford one day to interview Mark Twain. The result seemed satisfactory to Bok, but wishing to be certain that it would be satisfactory to Clemens, he sent him a copy ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... set her mind on this apartment," George explained. "She's got some old cronies there, and I guess she's been looking forward to the games of bridge and the kind of harmless gossip that goes on in such places. Really, it's a life she'd like better than anything else—better than that she's lived at home, I really believe. It struck me she's just about got to have it, and after all she could ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... "we're not in the least like people in a book. I often wonder why Priorsford is so unlike a story-book little town. We're not nearly interested enough in each other for one thing. We don't gossip to excess. Everyone goes his or her own way. In books people do things or are suspected of doing things, and are immediately cut by a feverishly interested neighbourhood. I can't imagine that happening in Priorsford. No one ever does anything very striking, but if they did I'm sure ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... may be observed here that there are few who know so little as to the sexual morality of the people around them as clergymen. It does not become them, of course, to enter into the gossip of the village, nor does anyone care to broach such subjects in the first instance; and I may mention here that a relative of my own, a clergyman in a country parish, told me that if anything went wrong in these respects he was ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... why did not those wretches say in which month Yram was married? If she had married soon after he had left, this was why he had not been sent for or written to. Pray heaven it was so. As for current gossip, people would talk, and if the lad was well begotten, what could it matter to them whose son he was? "But," thought my father, "I am glad I did not meet him on my way down. I had rather have been ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... junction with the army of the brilliant admiral and Petersburg hero Wittgenstein, this mood and the gossip of the staff reached their maximum. Kutuzov saw this and merely sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Only once, after the affair of the Berezina, did he get angry and write to Bennigsen (who reported separately to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... about the matter. Farrant respectfully solicited the lease, and made the significant request that he might "pull down one partition, and so make two rooms—one." Neville, in a friendly letter beginning with "hearty commendations unto you and to Mrs. More," and ending with light gossip, urged Sir William to let the rooms to Farrant, and recommended Farrant as a desirable tenant ("I dare answer for him"). Neither letter mentioned the purpose for which the rooms, especially the large room referred to by Farrant, were to be used; but More doubtless understood that ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... returned the perfume-seller. He was a Turk, dignified and gracious, and of no mind to listen to gossip from the harem, of which it was little short of scandalous to speak so publicly. He had other customers in his shop who could hear, amongst them a black-browed Druze in a green turban, who was waiting patiently his turn, and who seemed to listen intently to this most improper gossip. The slave ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... and pleased Miss Ethel. She came and reposed in Madame de Florac's quiet chamber, or sate in the shade in the sober old garden of her hotel; away from all the trouble and chatter of the salons, the gossip of the embassies, the fluttering ceremonial of the Parisian ladies' visits in their fine toilettes, the fadaises of the dancing dandies, and the pompous mysteries of the old statesmen who frequented her grandmother's apartment. The world began for ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trumpet-blasts, and were as utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre. History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the world for a village. This life could only become other than phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... mischievous as little imps, sported about, rolling on the grass and throwing handfuls of sand into the other's eyes, heedless of the risk of blinding, while their mothers were engrossed in that grave gossip which marks the dwellers in villages. These gatherings occurred daily before the fisherman's house; they formed a tacit and almost involuntary homage, consecrated by custom, and of which no one had ever taken special account; the envy that rules in small communities would soon have suppressed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... No! not to Mr. Brodfresser,[47] nor to Mr. Commissioner:—but to Marton, to old Marton? Has old Marton ever let out anything? Old Marton knows much that would be worth his while to tell tales about: have you ever heard of old Marton being a gossip? Has old Marton ever told tales against you or anyone else? And if I could help you ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... Degrees to repeat the Heads of Sermons, which she heard, and to accomplish her with other Things, which would afterwards be of Use to her. Now these Things being wholly new to the Girl, which had been brought up at Home, to do nothing but gossip and play, she soon grew weary of this Life, she absolutely refus'd to submit to what her Husband requir'd of her; and when her Husband press'd her about it, she would cry continually, sometimes she would throw herself ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... always brings with it, to the idler and the man of leisure, a longing for the leafy shade and the green luxuriance of the country. It is pleasant to interchange the din of the city, the movement of the crowd, and the gossip of society, with the silence of the hamlet, the quiet seclusion of the grove, and the gossip of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... appeal case going on—and an appeal was too expensive an amusement to be indulged in often—there was always a good deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the convent, and to give them something to think about and gossip about nearer home. We have the best authority—the authority of the great Pope Innocent III.—for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth century were extremely fond of beer; but there was something else that they were even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... acting the star role on a similar happy occasion. Complacent matrons, in their Sunday best, exchanged voluble comments. The wedding party was a trifle late, and the guests were all early which gave opportunity for soul-satisfying gossip. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... would gossip, and I should not like that,' said she; 'only it is very hard to make out for myself, and those ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sheet, which had existed one hundred and ten years, when it was merged, in 1874, by purchase of the copyright, into the Morning Chronicle, in its early days, was nearly the sole exponent of the wants— of the gossip (in prose and in verse)—and of the daily events of Quebec. As such, though, from the standard of to-day, it may seem quaint and puny, still it does not appear an untruthful mirror of social life in the ancient capital. Its centenary number ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... allegations may have been untrue or exaggerated, but individuals were pointed out who in a mysterious manner had suddenly become affluent; it would at any rate have been as well if the I.N.C. had ordered some investigation. Since they failed to do so, it is natural that gossip flourished. In Triest, by the way, even the Italian population is reputed to have been disgusted when about forty waggon-loads of flour and twenty of sugar were taken from the stores of the former Austrian army ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... English opinion to that of the English minister. Earl Clarendon and Lord Palmerston held back from the British parliament and public a correct knowledge of the facts, until it transpired, through Parisian gossip, that the French, English, and Austrian ministers were willing to accept peace on the condition of Russia and the allies keeping an equal naval armament in the Black Sea. The way in which Austria had hoodwinked ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time reading gossip and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... at the Chateau des Noires-Fontaines and keep on the watch, but could he trust the servants? Michel and Jacques would hold their tongues, Roland was sure of them; but Charlotte, the jailer's daughter, she might gossip. However, it was three o'clock in the morning, every one was asleep, and the safest plan was certainly to put himself in communication with Michel. Michel would find some ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... sir," said the frightened clerk,—"nothing new as I hear of but gossip, and that aint a thing to interest a clergyman. There's always one report or another flying about, but them follies aint for your hearing. Nothing more," continued Mr Elsworthy, conscious of guilt, and presenting a very tremulous countenance to the inspection ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the big room where men were already foregathering to gossip between drinks of the trial and of the man who was to die. Bill bethought him of the young stranger; made some inquiries of certain inoffensive individuals among the crowd, and sent Jim out with instructions to find the kid and bring ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... there is any. I never yet lived in a cow-country where there wasn't more or less talk of—rustling. You don't want to take gossip like that too seriously. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... tokens," said Father Shoveller. "See my young foresters, ye be new to the world. Take an old man's counsel, and never show, nor speak of such gear in an hostel. Mine host of the White Hart is an old gossip of mine, and indifferent honest, but who shall say who ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cold looks, averted eyes and peculiar nods and gestures which perplexed her beyond measure; but presently the pervading gossip found its way to her, and she understood them—then. Her pride was stung. She was astonished, and at first incredulous. She was about to ask her mother if there was any truth in these reports, but upon second thought held her peace. She soon gathered that Major Lackland's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Stephen gazed at her in silence. Was it possible that she had not heard the gossip about Benham and Mrs. Rokeby? Was she trying to mislead him by an appearance of flippancy? Or was there some deeper purpose, some serious attempt to learn the truth ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... not very easy to procure a direction to the fold in question, as none of the neighbours were of the flock that resorted thither, and few knew anything more of it than the name. At last, a gossip of Mrs Nubbles's, who had accompanied her to chapel on one or two occasions when a comfortable cup of tea had preceded her devotions, furnished the needful information, which Kit had no sooner obtained ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... now knew of the feud between Banion and Woodhull, and the cause underlying it. Woman gossip did what it might. A half dozen determined men quietly watched Woodhull. As many continually were near Banion, although for quite a different reason. All knew that time alone must work out the answer to this implacable quarrel, and that the friends ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... since confirmed her faith in his judgment by much silent inquiry of the newspapers. They had the Sunday edition of the Lakeland Light at Pymantoning, and Cornelia had kept herself informed of the "Gossip of the Ateliers," and concerning "Women and Artists," "Artists' Summer Homes," "Phases of Studio Life," "The Ladies who are Organizing Ceramic Clubs," "Women Art Students," "Glimpses of the Dens of ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... always forecasting good," retorted Ada, with a smile, "so that things are pretty well balanced after all. Come now, Ingeborg, don't be cross, but leave the dough, and let us go to thy room, for I want to have a little gossip with ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... laugh, and crimsoned all over. She knew perfectly well what he was about. He was determined to perform all that could possibly be required of him. He would put down invidious comments, disarm gossip, in short cut off the gorgon's head at the first struggle. They might term it unnatural, overdone, but at least it would not be to do again; and Harry Jardine's was the temper, that, if you presented an obstacle to it, it itched the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... talks upon paper, of the trifling affairs of every-day life, adding here and there a sparkling anecdote, a bit of gossip, a delicate characterization, a trenchant criticism, a dash of wit, a touch of feeling, or a profound thought. All this is lighted up by her passionate love of her daughter, and in this light we read the many-sided life ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... making his own plans as he went along. "If I tell these villagers outright that Mother Huldah is in need, each person will think, 'O well, Neighbor Jude, or Gossip Dorcas has more to spare than I. Someone else will take care of the poor old lady, I am sure.' And it will end in her getting nothing at all. I will not talk about her, but to each person I will talk about himself, for that is the way ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... Chateaurien looked him in the eye, and apologized pleasantly for being so much in the way. Thereupon Rohrer procured an introduction to him, and made some observations derogatory to the valor and virtue of the French. There was current a curious piece of gossip of the French court: a prince of the blood royal, grandson of the late Regent and second in the line of succession to the throne of France, had rebelled against the authority of Louis XV, who had commanded him to marry the Princess Henriette, cousin to both of ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... in his balance, and found them wanting. In a letter to his wife, he writes: "Nothing but miserable trifles do these people trouble themselves about. They strike me as infinitely more ridiculous with their important ponderosity concerning the gathered rags of gossip, than even a member of the Second Chamber of Berlin in the full consciousness of his dignity.... The men of the minor States are mostly mere caricatures of periwig diplomatists, who at once put on their official visage if I merely beg of them a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... country roads. Falsehood thrust itself forward and played the hypocrite; the bells on the fool's cap jingled, and declared they were church-bells, and the noise became so bad for the Hearer that he thrust his fingers into his ears. Still, he could hear false notes and bad singing, gossip and idle words, scandal and slander, groaning and moaning, without and within. "Heaven help us!" He thrust his fingers farther and farther into his ears, till at last the drums burst. And now he could hear nothing more of the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... ails you?" exclaimed Madeleine, perceiving that Emma paid no attention to her idle gossip. "When I ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... forward and tapped the Lord Chamberlain on the shoulder. "Let the gentleman remain, gossip, and see you that remaining he goeth not like a fly with his feet in the porridge." With a flippant step before the Seigneur, he shook his bells at him. "Thou shalt stay, Nuncio, and staying speak the truth. So doing you shall be as noted as a comet with three tails. You shall prove that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... three or four dinners to our good political friends," said M. Martin-Belleme. "We shall invite some of the ancient radicals to meet the people of our circle. It will be well to find some pretty women. We might invite Madame Berard de la Malle; there has been no gossip about her for two years. What ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... high antiquity. But what possesses the Rhine tourist to moralize? He is a restless creature in general, more occupied in staring than in seeing—a gregarious creature too, who enjoys the evening table d'hote, the day-old Times and the British or American gossip as a reward for his having conscientiously done whatever Murray or Baedeker bade him. Cook has only transformed the tourist's mental docility into a bodily one: the guidebook had long drilled his mind before the tour-contractor thought of drilling his body and driving willing gangs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
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