you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and

sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which

may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those

faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special

province.”


“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself

absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my

records.”


“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder

with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to

replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative

mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life

into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of

placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really

the only notable feature about the thing.”


“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I

remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more

than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular

character.


“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was

his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for

my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself.

Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon

the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a

course of lectures into a series of tales.”


It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either

side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down

between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like

dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and