Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.

I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.

It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.