the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling." Those,
however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it.
For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity
long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the
most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or
rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated
in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as
"Weary Willie," and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long
procession of its portraits.

Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a
very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series
of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered
no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois's theory (which was
that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by
convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford,
and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism". But many American papers
seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox
already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were
presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac,
headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the
Shocks"--or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun
Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and
lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker
Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.

That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening.
The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills;
the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about
his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country
inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.

In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time
for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with
close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very
bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course,