Detectives, my dear sir, or madam, are not by any means such sharp personages as writers of fiction generally love to depict. There are some especially "cute" members of the force I don't for a moment deny; but as a class their knowledge and acquirements are fearfully exaggerated. Indeed, I must be so severe as to call them at once, humbugs; but they deceive themselves quite as greatly and as often as they deceive the public, and are by no means so sharp as the malefactors they are set to catch. I think a clergyman I once knew would have made a far better detective than a good many real _mouchoirs_ I have come across. He had the gift of at once divining at the truth, investigating the morality and ethics of his parishioners which not one detective in a hundred possesses. They put on a great deal of mystery, and appear to "know all about it," but they are really much more shallow conjurers than Herr Frickell when, turning up the sleeves of his coat and his snow-white wristbands and calling his audience's attention to the theory that there is "no preparation, gentlemen! no preparation," at once proceeds to smuggle eggs up his sleeves with a "Hi, Presto! Begone!" The detective placed great emphasis on the fact that Susan had taken Miss Kingscott's dress and bonnet with her. "Putting two and two together," as he said, he delivered himself of the oracular assertion, that she "must have gone off somewhere," which, of course, no one else would have dreamt of but the dowager, who observed snappishly that she could have told him that before, and advised him to try and find out where the girl had gone to, as that was what he had been employed for. Whereupon, John Bounce appeared all at once to wake up to the notion that he would have to go somewhere else to look for the missing girl. He asked if they had enquired about her at the nearest railway station, and was told they had; and on being further told that another station, Bigglethorpe, was also not far from The Poplars, he said she might have gone there, which was also perfectly feasible to the meanest comprehension.