“Being one who prefers news without sensationalism, I had never before read a line from any one of these three papers. I came to these extracts, therefore, with a mind not only open but blank, and was immediately struck by the strange unanimity of the three newspapers in regard to John Hoode. For, as all the world must know, whether they read them or not, the trio are of politics widely varying. Their attacks upon the murdered man were made upon different grounds, it is true, but the very fact that the attacks were made, and made so viciously, struck me as unusual. It seemed to me that in the ordinary way the fact of one attacking would be enough to make at least one of the others defend. Further, the grounds upon which the attacks were made appeared to my unbiased mind as flimsy compared with the whole-hearted virulence of the writing. “From wondering and re-reading, I came upon a thing yet stranger: the unmistakable and mysterious similarity in the style of the composition. This similarity was to me, who have made something of a study of other men’s methods, even more pronounced when attempts had been made to disguise or vary the manner of writing. After ten minutes’ examination of those cuttings, I was prepared to swear that one man had been conducting the anti-Hoode campaign in three papers whose views on every other matter from vaccination to the Vatican are as wide apart as Stoke Poges, Seattle, and Sinbad the Sailor. I pictured a man of some scholastic attainment who was unable to write in fashion other than preciously correct and so set in his style as to be incapable of varying it, tried he never so hard. “I took the cuttings and my conviction to Deacon. He could not help me, so I went to his predecessor as Hoode’s private secretary (the real private secretary, like Deacon, not the departmental one.) From him I obtained confirmation of my theory. He, too, had suspected that not only was one man behind these press attacks, but that this man was also the actual author. He showed me something I had only half-noticed till then; something which went further than mere similarity of style. Throughout the articles, he pointed out, quotations occurred. They were, some of them, unusual quotations. But usual or unusual, one and all were correct! They were correct in some cases to the point of pedantry—if correctness can be so described. And they were thus correct in these three widely differing and highly sensational papers, whose literary standards have always been a byword with those who hate journalese, _cliché_, and the dreadful mutilation, humiliation and weakening of the English language.