A Study in Scarlet — page 33: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A STUDY IN SCARLET. 25 egg-spoon as I sat down to my breakfast. T see that you have read it, since you have marked it. I don’t deny that it is smartly written. It irritates me, though. It is evidently the theory of some arm-chair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his own study. It is not practical. I should like to see him clapped down in a third-class carnage on the Un- derground, and asked to give the trades of all his fellow- travelers. I would lay a thousand to one against him.” “You would lose your money,” Sherlock Holmes re- marked, calmly. ‘‘As for the article, I wrote it myself.” Youll “Ves: I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.” “ And how?” I asked, involuntarily. “Well, I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’ma consulting detective, if you can understand what that is. Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of pri- vate ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the de- tails of a thousand at your finger-ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first. Lestrade is a ecomniclooolks.g