It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions--in fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get more out of Paramore than he can get out of himself--but do get down on your knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew--as I learned afterward--but he told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg, etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying (his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain amount of time, but that was the net result. Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly, as if in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud, Hoyting sent for me.