"MY dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on
either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street,
"life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind
of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive the
things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover
over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in
at the queer things which are going on, the strange coin-
cidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful
chains of events, working through generations, and leading
to the most outré results, it would make all fiction, with
its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale
and unprofitable."

"And yet I am not convinced of it," I answered. "The
cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald
enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports
realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is,
it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic."

"A certain selection and discretion must be used in pro-
ducing a realistic effect," remarked Holmes. "This is want-
ing in the police report, where more stress is laid perhaps
upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details,
which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole
matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as
the commonplace."

I smiled and shook my head. "I can quite understand
your thinking so," I said. "Of course, in your position
of unofficial adviser and helper to everybody who is abso-
lutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you are brought
in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But here"

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