t the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
"scientific age," which wants to know whether the train is in the
timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one
instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the
case of photography.

Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared,
and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so
that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted
or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders,
a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I
should have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man,
with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.

Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,
if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and
dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic
or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked
like some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of
coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately
under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have
been painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one
under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches
of Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which
Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes
distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of
them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could
have picked him out in any crowd—so long as you had not seen his
photograph.

But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental and
conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits
of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring
of cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the
darkness out of the hair and made