delicacy prevented me from forcing another man to confide in me. I imagined at

the time that he had some strong reason for not alluding to it, but he soon

dispelled the idea by coming round to the subject of his own accord.

 

It was upon the 4th of March, as I have good reason to remember, that I rose

somewhat earlier than usual, and found that Sherlock Holmes had not yet finished

his breakfast. The landlady had become so accustomed to my late habits that my

place had not been laid nor my coffee prepared. With the unreasonable petulance

of mankind I rang the bell and gave a curt intimation that I was ready. Then I

picked up a magazine from the table and attempted to while away the time with

it, while my companion munched silently at his toast. One of the articles had a

pencil mark at the heading, and I naturally began to run my eye through it.

 

Its somewhat ambitious title was “The Book of Life,” and it attempted to show

how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination

of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of

shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the

deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed

by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom

a man’s inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the

case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as

infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results

appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had

arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer.