""Dear girl," continued Bob advancing with an imbecile grin upon his countenance, which he imagined no doubt to be a seductive smile, "fly with me! Be mine! Share with me the wild free life of a barrister! Say that you return the love which consumes my heart - oh, say it!" Here Bob put his hand over a hole in his waistcoat and struck a dramatic attitude.

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.

An absence of antecedents and of relatives is sometimes an aid rather than an impediment to social advancement . . .

The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by my wrist and pushed me back into my chair. 'It is both, or none,' said he. 'You may say before this gentleman anything which you may say to me.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?