well knows, are to be given to the public in next week’s illustrated paper.  The feathered end of his shaft titillates harmlessly enough, but too often the arrowhead is crusted with a poison worse than the Indian gets by mingling the wolf’s gall with the rattlesnake’s venom.  No man is safe whose unguarded threshold the mischief-making questioner has crossed.  The more unsuspecting, the more frank, the more courageous, the more social is the subject of his vivisection, the more easily does he get at his vital secrets, if he has any to be extracted.  No man is safe if the hearsay reports of his conversation are to be given to the public without his own careful revision.  When we remember that a proof-text bearing on the mighty question of the future life, words of supreme significance, uttered as they were in the last hour, and by the lips to which we listen as to none other,—­that this text depends for its interpretation on the position of a single comma, we can readily see what wrong may be done by the unintentional blunder of the most conscientious reporter.  But too frequently it happens that the careless talk of an honest and high-minded man only reaches the public after filtering through the drain of some reckless hireling’s memory,—­one who has played so long with other men’s characters and good name that he forgets they have any value except to fill out his morning paragraphs.

Whether the author of the scandalous letter which it was disgraceful to the government to recognize was a professional interviewer or only a malicious amateur, or whether he was a paid “spotter,” sent by some jealous official to report on the foreign ministers as is sometimes done in the case of conductors of city horsecars, or whether the dying miscreant before mentioned told the truth, cannot be certainly known.  But those who remember Mr. Hawthorne’s account of his consular experiences at Liverpool are fully aware to what intrusions and impertinences and impositions our national representatives in other countries are subjected.  Those fellow-citizens who “often came to the consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to subject their public servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was getting on with his duties,” may very possibly have included among them some such mischief-maker as the author of the odious letter which received official recognition.  Mr. Motley had spoken in one of his histories of “a set of venomous familiars who glided through every chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside.”  He little thought that under his own roof he himself was to be the victim of an equally base espionage.