Le Caron owed much of that quasi-heroic reputation which grew up around him and his career to the fact that he appeared on a drab enough stage as the only figure with melodramatic possibilities inherent in it at a time when the Americanised type of journalism was creeping into England and when journalists were being gradually initiated into the mysteries of writing up what is technically known among newspaper men as the "human interest" side of all persons and things. In the personal cast of the Parnell Commission and its long-drawn sessions, there was nothing of picturesque interest outside the occasional appearance in the witness-box of Irish peasants who were called upon to bear witness, in Doric accents, to the truth. Apart from these, the individuals who gave testimony were a bunch of frock-coated, plug-hatted Philistines of the most "orn'ery" description, as they say out West, men who used unfailingly to put the special writers to sleep. In Parnell there was nothing, externally at least, which could be said to be in any way picturesque, and Biggar only came up to the specifications of a very curious picture. Along, then, came Le Caron, a veritable godsend to the correspondents who were gaping for a bit of decent colour. The Major may be trusted, as a man who had touched hands with the American journalist, to have realised and seized his opportunity. The obvious Napoleon pose, the arms folded across the breast, the sharp sibilant tones, the Westerner's "yus, yus" and "no, siree," the Machiavellian suggestion of knowing all there was to be known about mystic shrines and tangled intrigues, the obvious consciousness of being the apparent villain of the piece who was finally, he thought, to issue as its real hero, the glacial fixity of the stare, the pose of long-suffering righteousness—yes, the spy in the witness-box was exactly what the New Journalists were looking for, and in making Le Caron they were helping to make themselves. IV SCHULMEISTER