I followed you.' I saw no one.' That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.

Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.

I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his

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

'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'