"I suppose that is so," said I, pulling away upon the very excellent stogie which mine host had provided--one made in Pittsburg in 1885, and purchased by Holmes, whose fine taste in tobacco had induced him to lay a thousand of these down in his cigar-cellar for three years, and then keep them in a refrigerator, overlaid with a cloth soaked in Château Yquem wine for ten. The result may be better imagined than described. Suffice it to say that my head did not recover for three days, and the ash had to be cut off the stogie with a knife. "I suppose so, my dear Holmes," I repeated, taking my knife and cutting three inches of the stogie off and casting it aside, furtively, lest he should think I did not appreciate the excellence of the tobacco, "but it is not given to all of us to see the little things. Is it, now?" "Yes," he said, rising and picking up the rejected portion of the stogie. "We all see everything that goes on, but we don't all know it. We all hear everything that goes on, but we are not conscious of the fact. For instance, at this present moment there is somewhere in this world a man being set upon by assassins and yelling lustily for help. Now his yells create a certain atmospheric disturbance. Sound is merely vibration, and, once set going, these vibrations will run on and on and on in ripples into the infinite--that is, they will never stop, and sooner or later these vibrations must reach our ears. We may not know it when they do, but they will do so none the less. If the man is in the next room, we will hear the yells almost simultaneously--not quite, but almost--with their utterance. If the man is in Timbuctoo, the vibrations may not reach us for a little time, according to the speed with which they travel. So with sight. Sight seems limited, but in reality it is not. _Vox populi, vox Dei_. If _vox_, why not _oculus_? It is a simple proposition, then, that the eye of the people being the eye of God, the eye of God being all-seeing, therefore the eye of the people is all-seeing--Q. E. D." I gasped, and Holmes, cracking a walnut, gazed into the fire for a moment. "It all comes down, then," I said, "to the question, who are the people?" Holmes smiled grimly. "All men," he replied, shortly; "and when I say all men, I mean all creatures who can reason." "Does that include women?" I asked. "Certainly," he said. "Indubitably. The fact that women _don't_ reason does not prove that they can't. I _can_ go up in a balloon if I wish to, but I _don't_. I _can_ read an American newspaper comic supplement, but I _don't_. So it is with women. Women can reason, and therefore they have a right to be included in the classification whether they do or don't."