Excerpt from A Century of Gossip: Or the Real and the SeemingNo New England village is complete without a shoe shop. It is the place of resort for old and young, the "home, " where male gossips love to congregate in the evening and pass around the tit-bits of scandal that have been gathered during the day. Bits of scandal never grow less by being passed around in a shoe shop, and in this respect scandal is unlike a plug of tobacco, 'though both are pernicious.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.