It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

"I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."

Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.