swald is too
much of a man to quarrel about a little thing like that.

'I should like to be a detective,' said--perhaps it was Dicky, but I
think not--'and find out strange and hidden crimes.'

'You have to be much cleverer than you are,' said H. O.

'Not so very,' Alice said, 'because when you've read the books you know
what the things mean: the red hair on the handle of the knife, or the
grains of white powder on the velvet collar of the villain's overcoat. I
believe we could do it.'

'I shouldn't like to have anything to do with murders,' said Dora;
'somehow it doesn't seem safe--'

'And it always ends in the poor murderer being hanged,' said Alice.

We explained to her why murderers have to be hanged, but she only said,
'I don't care. I'm sure no one would ever do murdering _twice_. Think
of the blood and things, and what you would see when you woke up in the
night! I shouldn't mind being a detective to lie in wait for a gang
of coiners, now, and spring upon them unawares, and secure
them--single-handed, you know, or with only my faithful bloodhound.'

She stroked Pincher's ears, but he had gone to sleep because he knew
well enough that all the suet pudding was finished. He is a very
sensible dog. 'You always get hold of the wrong end of the stick,'
Oswald said. 'You can't choose what crimes you'll be a detective about.
You just have to get a suspicious circumstance, and then you look for a
clue and follow it up. Whether it turns out a murder or a missing will
is just a fluke.'

'That's one way,' Dicky said. 'Another is to get a paper and find
two advertisements or bits of news that fit. Like this: "Young Lady
Missing," and then it tells about all the clothes she had on, and the
gold locket she wore, and the colour of her hair, and all that; and then
in another piece of the paper you see, "Gold locket found," and then it
all comes out.'

We sent H. O. for the paper at once, but we could not make any of the
things fit in. The two best were about how some burglars broke into
a place in Holloway where they made preserved tongues and invalid
delicacies, and carried off a lot of them. And on another page there
was, 'Mysterious deaths in Holloway.'

Oswald thought there was something in it, and so did Albert's uncle when
we asked him, but the others thought not, so Oswald agreed to drop it.
Besides, Holloway is a long way off. All the time we were talking about
the paper Alice seemed to be thinking about somet