"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock

Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily

Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest

manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is

pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped

this truth that in these little records of our cases which you

have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say,

occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much

to the many causes celebres 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 color 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-colored houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark,

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

and 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 endeavored 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.