The Complete Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

“I don’t think you need alarm yourself,” said I. “I have usually found that there was method in his madness.” “Some folks might say there was madness in his method,” muttered the Inspector.

Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me,

“Why, they are only waiting for her to come to her senses to arrest her.” “My God! Are you in the police yourself?” “No.” “What business is it of yours, then?” “It’s every man’s business to see justice done.”

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

“Well, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, you may look for your tramp, and while you are finding him we will hold on to our man. The future will show which is right.

But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect--to draw the rope tighter yet round the neck of his unfortunate victim--and so he ruined all.

My own inclination is to put half a dozen of my farm lads in the shrubbery, and when this fellow comes again to give him such a hiding that he will leave us in peace for the future.”

For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’s ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes.

“I will, my dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a case of murder.”

Trelawney

Professor Trelawney was the divination teacher in Harry Potter

“We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

‘Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just.’

There was a curious secretive streak in the man which led to many dramatic effects, but left even his closest friend guessing as to what his exact plans might be. He pushed to an extreme the axiom that the only safe plotter was he who plotted alone.

Speaking of my old friend and biographer, I would take this opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice, but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances. A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.