In his tight place, beset by doubts just as acute as those of the young theologian, our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the quaint processes of mind. He broods on the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible nature of most mortal opinion. He studies the relativity of truth and the proliferation of rumour. He notes how every event is like a stone cast into a pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations, widening loops of hearsay. Varying layers or rings of truth are available for different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers. How well he knows the queer fact that you can say, unrebuked, in a weekly what would never pass in a daily! You can say still more in a monthly; in a quarterly review almost all the beans can be decanted. And in a book, quite often you can print your surmises in full. Of course, to tell exactly what happens, as Pepys did, it is best to be dead. (How odd is the saying, “Dead men tell no tales.” Why, they tell the best tales of all.) It does sometimes seem as though the more immediate readers there are for any bit of print, the less candour can be rationed out for each.[B] So every human being stands at the centre of a little eddy or whirl of testimony. If one could make a map or editor’s projection of him considered as a news item--it would be as complicated as an ocean chart with festoons of barographs and isotherms, curves and twists and arrows indicating set of currents, prevailing winds, soundings. On such a chart, we would denote here a cyclone of scandal, there a hot monsoon of misappreciation, yonder a steady trade-wind of generous sympathy. In an ocean so various we should find our victim leading a thousand different phantom lives in the opinion of others. If you begin to think about this sort of thing, the asylum waits; for truly, confronted by the alternating delights and possibilities of life, the mind is not unlike that chameleon that went mad when tethered on a Paisley shawl.