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 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
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