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