I need hardly say that the Press was very amusing at my expense, but its comment was not always particularly intelligent. Indeed, the only sensible criticism I remember was a cartoon in which I was represented as an exhibit at a freak-show, with six fingers on each hand. But the greater part of my critics seemed to have entirely missed the point at issue. They all seemed obsessed with the idea, either that I multiplied three by four into ten, or that I multiplied five by two into twelve, or both. The words “tink” and “tonk” naturally caught on with the humorists of the day; indeed, I believe a revue entitled “Tink tonk” was still running at the outbreak of the Great War. Some of my serious critics were even more entertaining, and I was severely reproved by more than one religiously minded correspondent for upsetting the eternal laws of number, ordained for us by a wise Providence when it gave us fingers and toes. But I was not to be moved by any kind of opposition, and the support of Juliet Savage prevented the public from laughing me out of court. In the end, as my readers will probably remember, the situation became so acute that the Prime Minister actually came back from France and held a Round Table Conference at Chequers. For a time it looked as if no _modus vivendi_ could be arrived at, but at last statesmanship triumphed, and a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the relative merits of decimal and duodecimal numeration, which is still sitting to-day. I need only mention one other of my public activities, which remains a legitimate boast; it was a Private Member’s Bill, brought forward by myself, that procured the erection of the great statue of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. I pointed out that London was now the only European capital which had no statue of the kind, and the plaque on No. 221B Baker Street was a quite inadequate recognition of the famous detective’s services. The question whether he had ever existed did not affect, or ought not to affect, the feelings of veneration with which we regarded him. When the bill passed, I was elected a member of the Committee which was to decide between the various designs sent in. The prevailing taste at the moment was Futuribilism, but none of the artists then in vogue seemed to have treated his subject adequately. Several of them represented the head merely as a square block of stone, on the ground that all attempts to imitate the features in sculpture were a violation of the canons of Art. Another, on the same ground, represented the figure as strictly globular. I am glad to say that it was at my instigation the Committee chose the design sent in by Wrightman, then quite unknown, but destined to become famous as one of the leaders of the neo-classical school in the sixties. The conception is a noble one, and if some have found fault with the pipe as out of keeping with the classical draperies in which the figure is represented, it is not for us to complain.