Altogether Too Smart

When I was studying my profession in the goodly city of B——, my chief visitor at the exceedingly modest lodging I occupied was no less a person than the chief of police, who almost invariably dropped in of an evening on this way to the office, to smoke a pipe with myself and such of my fellow students as happened to be there on the same errand. He had known my father, and insisted upon it that he was the greatest lawyer of his generation—an opinion which, I regret to say, was not that of the public at large.

On the other hand, my father had often spoken of the chief as the “best detective he ever heard of,” and this praise seemed to me much better deserved than the other, for the chief was certainly a detective born, not made. He had as little of the look and manner of the ideal detective as could well be… Read More