shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not

been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping

continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at

last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet

temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.


“At the same time,” he remarked after a pause, during which he had

sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, “you can

hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you

have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of

crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to

help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the

problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the

noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in

avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the

trivial.”


“The end may have been so,” I answered, “but the methods I

hold to have been novel and of interest.”


“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public,

who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb,

care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are

trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or

at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own

little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost

lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think

that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks

my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!” He tossed a crumpled letter across to

me.


It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus: