at was the date
when Charles Darwin's great fructifying theory, enunciated in 1859,
began to seep into the South.

In the Captain's library the only notice of evolution was a book called
"Darwinism Dethroned." As for the elaborations of the Darwinian
hypothesis by Spencer, Fiske, DeVries, Weismann, Haeckel, Kidd, Bergson,
and every subsequent philosophic or biologic writer, all these men might
never have written a line so far as Captain Renfrew's library was
informed.

Now, why such extraordinary occlusions? Why should Captain Renfrew deny
himself the very commonplaces of thought, theories familiarly held by
the rest of America, and, indeed, by all the rest of the civilized
world?

Musing by the window, Peter succeeded in stating his problem more
broadly: Why was Captain Renfrew an intellectual reactionist? The old
gentleman was the reverse of stupid. Why should he confine his selection
of books to a few old oddities that had lost their battle against a
theory which had captured the intellectual world fifty years before?

Nor was it Captain Renfrew alone. Now and then Peter saw editorials
appearing in leading Southern journals, seriously attacking the
evolutionary hypothesis. Ministers in respectable churches still
fulminated against it. Peter knew that the whole South still clings, in
a way, to the miraculous and special creation of the earth as described
in Genesis. It clings with an intransigentism and bitterness far
exceeding other part of America. Why? To Peter the problem appeared
insoluble.

He sat by the window lost in his reverie. Just outside the ledge half a
dozen English sparrows abused one another with chirps that came faintly
through the small diamond panes. Their quick movements held Peter's
eyes, and their endless quarreling presently recalled his episode with
young Arkwright. It occurred to him, casually, that when Arkwright grew
up he would subscribe to every reactionary doctrine set forth in the
library Peter was indexing.

With that thought came a sort of mental flare, as if he were about to
find the answer to the whole question through the concrete attack made
on him by Sam.

It is an extraordinary feeling,--the sudden, joyful dawn of a new idea.
Peter sat up sharply and leaned forward with a sense of being right on
the fringe of a new and a great perception. Young Arkwright, the old
Captain, the whole South, were unfolding themselves in a vast answer,
when a movement outside the window ca