ciable

Christmas time with its free days and its social gatherings was at hand;
and the Church folk must needs respond to the spirit of the season with
a "sociable." In such a meeting, the young minister is king--that is the
tradition--and on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the
heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was
quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free,
and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of
Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is
shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over
toward Belle, to consult, to whisper, to linger.

For such affairs there is a time-honoured and established programme that
was fairly well adhered to at least in the early part. They met at the
church parlours and gossiped; had a prayer, then more gossip; next
followed tea and cakes in a poisonous abundance, and more gossip. Now
the older preacher, as expected, read a chapter out of some safe story
book, amid gossip--harmless in the main, but still gossip. Next the
musical geniuses of the congregation were unchained. A perfectly
well-meaning young lady sang, "Be kind to your brother, he may not last
long," to an accompaniment of squeaks on the melodeon--and gossip. A boy
orator recited "Chatham's speech on American Independence," and received
an outburst of applause which, for a moment, overpowered the gossip.

Lou-Jane Hoomer, conspicuous for her intense hair and noisy laugh, had
been active in getting up the sociable, and now she contributed of her
talents by singing "Home, Sweet Home." About the middle of the second
period, according to custom, the preacher should recite "Barbara
Frietchie" to a whispering chorus of gossip. But Jim was brought up in a
land not reached by Barbara's fame and he made a new departure by giving
a Fenian poem--"Shamus O'Brien"--with such fervour that, for the moment,
the whisperers forgot to gossip.

Belle, as the manager of the affair, was needed everywhere and all the
time, but made no contribution to the programme. Lou-Jane scored such a
success with "Home, Sweet Home" that she was afterward surrounded by a
group of admirers, among them Jim Hartigan.

"Sure," he said, she "was liable to break up the meeting making every
one so homesick," and she replied that "it would never break up as long
as he was there to attract them all together."