harder to find a detective who is not in this sense a dead one. I have the feeling, being a lawyer myself, that it is harder to find a live detective than a live lawyer. There are a few of both, however, if you know where to look for them. But it is easy to fall into the hands of the Philistines. The fundamental reason why it is so hard to form any just opinion of detectives in general is that (except by their fruits) there is little opportunity to discriminate between the able and the incapable. Now, the more difficult and complicated his task the less likely is the sleuth (honest or otherwise) to succeed. The chances are a good deal more than even that he will never solve the mystery for which he is engaged. Thus at the end of three months you will have only his reports and his bill--which are poor comfort, to say the least. And yet he may have really worked eighteen hours a day in your service. But a dishonest detective has only to disappear (and take his ease for the same period) and send you his reports and his bill--and you will have only his word for how much work he has done and how much money he has spent. You are absolutely in his power--unless you hire another detective to watch HIM. Consequently there is no class in the world where the temptation to dishonesty is greater than among detectives. This, too, is, I fancy, the reason that the evidence of the police detective is received with so much suspicion by jurymen--they know that the only way for him to retain his position is by making a record and getting convictions, and hence they are always looking for jobs and frame-ups. If a police detective doesn't make arrests and send a man to jail every once in a while there is no conclusive way for his superiors to be sure he isn't loafing. There are a very large number of persons who go into the detective business for the same reason that others enter the ministry--they can't make a living at anything else, Provided he has squint eyes and a dark complexion, almost anybody feels that he is qualified to unravel the tangled threads of crime. The first resource of the superannuated or discharged police detective is to start an agency. Of course, he may be first class in spite of these disqualifications, but the presumption in the first instance is that he is no longer alert or effective, and in the second that in one way or another he is not honest. Agencies recruited from deposed and other ex-policemen usually have all the faults of the police without any of their virtues. There are many small agencies which do reliable work, and there are a number of private detectives in all the big cities who work single-handed and achieve excellent results. However, if he expects to accomplish anything by hiring detectives, the layman or lawyer must first make sure of his agency or his man.