Club-rooms, ball-rooms, card-tables, and confectioners’ shops, are the factories; and gossips, both male and female, are the labouring classes.  Norwich boasts of the durability of her stuffs; the manufacturers I allude to weave a web more flimsy.  The stuff of tomorrow will seldom be the same that is publicly worn to-day; and were it not for the zeal and assiduity of the labourers, we should want novelties to replace the stuff that is worn out hour by hour.

No man or woman who ever ventures to deviate from the beaten track should ever live in a country town.  The gossips all turn from the task of nibbling one another, and the character of the lusus naturae becomes public property.  I am the mother of a family, and I am known to have written romances.  My husband, in an evil hour, took a fancy to a house at a watering-place, which, by way of distinction, I shall designate by the appellation of Pumpington Wells:  there we established ourselves in the year 1800.

The manufacturers received us with a great show of civility, exhibiting to us the most recent stuff, and discussing the merits of the newest fabrications.  We, however, were not used to trouble ourselves about matters that did not concern us, and we soon offended them.

We turned a deaf ear to all evil communications.  If we were told that Mr. A., “though fond of show, starved his servants,” we replied, we did not wish to listen to the tale.  If we heard that Mr. B. though uxorious in public, was known to beat his wife in private, we cared not for the matrimonial anecdote.  When maiden ladies assured us that Mrs. C. cheated at cards, we smiled, for we had no dealings with her; and when we were told that Mrs. D. never paid her bills, we repeated not the account to the next person we met; for as we were not her creditors, her accounts concerned us not.

We settled ourselves, much to our satisfaction, in our provincial abode:  it was a watering-place, which my husband, as a bachelor, had frequented during its annual season.

As a watering-place he knew it well.  Such places are vastly entertaining to visiters, having no “local habitation,” and no “name”—­caring not for the politics of the place, and where, if any thing displeases them, they may pay for their lodgings, order post-horses, and never suffer their names to appear in the arrival book again.

But with those who live at watering-places, it is quite another affair.  For the first six months we were deemed a great acquisition.  There were two or three sets in Pumpington Wells—­the good, the bad, and the indifferent.  The bad left their cards, and asked us to dances, the week we arrived; the indifferent knocked at our door in the first month; and even before the end of the second, we were on the visiting lists of the good.  We knew enough of society to be aware that it is impolitic to rush into the embraces of all the arms that are extended to receive strangers; but feeling no wish to affront any one in return for an intended civility, we gave card for card; and the doors of good, bad, and indifferent, received our names.