I can see him now, the whole scene is clear before me, the brisk figure with its face of intense thought, crowned by a shock of unkempt gray hair, standing over me on the hearth-rug of his dingy consulting-room on the ground floor in Montague Street. He was following his quaint habit of swinging his magnificent gold repeater in front of him by its shabby scrap of ribbon, while he gave me the amazing news. “I’ve decided to take an assistant, Cassilis. I have passed my sixtieth birthday, and though my work interests me as much as ever, I mean to spare myself a little more in future. I don’t intend to turn out in the middle of the night because a bilious duchess fancies that someone has bribed her French maid to poison her. And I’ve told them at the Home Office--I suppose you know I’m their principal consultant--that I won’t be sent down to Cornwall one day and to Cumberland the next every time a coroner lets himself be puzzled by a simple case of strychnine or arsenic. It’s work for a younger man.” He waved the watch towards me as he went on. “Sir James Ponsonby--that’s the Permanent Under Secretary--has consented to my having a deputy, and I’m submitting your name.” I recall my sensations as he stopped abruptly and bent his keen eyes on me from beneath their bushy roof of eyebrow to see how the proposal struck me. I had gasped for breath then as I was gasping now. At the age of twenty-five, only just qualified for my profession, I was to be lifted at one step out of the struggling crowd into a position which was already success, and which I should only have to make proper use of to attain in time the same eminence as my patron. My answer must have been incoherent. But Tarleton interrupted it with a jerk of his gold repeater, which, I can remember, almost made me duck my head. “I’m paying you what most of the men in our profession would consider a doubtful compliment when I tell you that you seem to me to be a young man with imagination, Cassilis. And that is what’s wanted in my work. It isn’t doctor’s work really so much as detective’s. It’s not only symptoms I have to look for, but motives. There was a touch in your very first paper that showed me you could think for yourself, and speculate. And speculation is the master key of science, although all your second-rate men decry it. It’s the old fable of the fox who had lost his tail. Not having any imagination themselves, they would like to forbid it to everyone. The Trade Unions rule the world to-day, and they are all trying to reduce the intelligence of mankind to the lowest common denominator.”