vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We
scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not
true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud
of poisonous flies"?

What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's
clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the
old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature,
everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven,
as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how
eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way
of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar
scene with a quoted verse or two:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves
before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also
among them.

And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan
answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it."

And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"

Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for
nought?"

Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in