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The Green Bag.

punished. This would admonish one that when he is provoked to slander, to say of his neighbor, " He's mean, so mean that he steals mosquitoes out of my yard," the words will have no market value, for it is no larceny to accuse one of the stealing of these animals natures ferce. It is interesting to note, when it comes to this matter of speech, it is the rule that there should be no variance between the allegata and the probata. In other words, if you sue in an English-speaking court and the speech being inquired into was in Ger man, French, Spanish or any other tongue, it will not be sufficient to allege a translated speech and prove the translation, for it has been held that where slanderous words were spoken in a foreign language, they must be set forth together with a translation into English. To set forth the foreign words alone will not be sufficient, and to allege a publication of English words and prove a publication of words in another tongue is a variance. To charge a person with a slan der in English, does not inform him that he will be required to meet and defend words

uttered by him in a different language. There is nothing to indicate that any money will be saved in the market value by utter ing the words in a foreign language, for some one else may understand them and therein would lie the publication and value, unless it would be in some gibberish that no one could understand. In conclusion, great riches do not come in the buying and selling of slanderous words. It cannot be coaxed and coddled with unseemly language. It simply flees and tantalizes with an imagined nearness. Of course, if the one who has been slandered insists upon what is called his or her rights, the jury will give it to them in dollars and cents, the public will discuss the pros and cons no matter how the jury goes, and the lawyers will want their fees, whether there are rights or no rights. The last state of that man or woman will frequently be much worse than if the cheap slander would have been dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as not worth its weight in the coin of the realm, and as doing the publisher more harm in the end than the one aimed at.

THE MARSHALL MEMORIAL TABLET. Bv Maria Newton Marshall. THIS latest tribute to the memory of John Marshall has awakened in the public that peculiar interest that always at taches to the marking of the birthplace of a great man. Familiar enough to the reader and tourist are the country-seat and town house so closely associated with Marshall's private life,—"Oak Hill," the old home stead among the foothills of the Blue Ridge, in Fauquier County, Virginia, built by his father before the Revolution; and the colo nial mansion on the corner of Ninth and

Marshall Streets, Richmond, erected by him self a few years after he had settled in that city for the practice of law. But though these halls may ring with his fame, and frame for us many a picture of the man in his stirring youth and maturer years, a humbler abode enjoyed the distinc tion of having been the birthplace of " the great Chief Justice " and his home during the first ten years of his life. On Licking Run, near Germantown, in the County of Fauquier,— in the angle made