Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

I play the game for the game’s own sake.

You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

[ Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson :] The fair sex is your department.

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!

Like all Holmes’s reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained.

Then we rushed on into the captain’s cabin . . . and there he lay . . . while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. 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.