s" are proud of him. The only drawback is that he has been
christened "Mrs. Senior Subaltern"; and, as there are now two Mrs. Senior
Subalterns in the Station, this is sometimes confusing to strangers.

Later on, I will tell you of a case something like this, but with all the
jest left out and nothing in it but real trouble.

A. Conan Doyle

_A Case of Identity_

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the
fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than
anything which the mind of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive
the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could
fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently
remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the
strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful
chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most
_outre_ results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and
foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable."

"And yet I am not convinced of it," I answered. "The cases which come to
light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We
have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet
the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic."

"A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic
effect," remarked Holmes. "This is wanting in the police report, where
more stress is laid perhaps upon the platitudes of the magistrate than
upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the
whole matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the
commonplace."

I smiled and shook my head. "I can quite understand your thinking so," I
said. "Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and helper to
everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you are
brought in contact with all that is strange and _bizarre_. But here"--I
picked up the morning paper from the ground--"let us put it to a practical
test. Here is the first heading upon which I come. 'A husband's cruelty to
his wife.' There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it
that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other
woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the unsympathetic sister
or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent