"Not the detective, at any rate," answered Murdock with suave irony. "It has always seemed to me that the halo which has been conferred upon him, chiefly through the efforts of imaginative writers of sensational fiction, is entirely undeserved. In the first place, most of the crimes of which we hear are committed either by men of a low order of intelligence or else by madmen, in which latter category I include all criminals acting under the impulse of any of the passions--hatred, love, jealousy, anger. And then, while the detective takes good care that his successes shall be proclaimed from the house-tops, he is equally careful to smother all accounts, or to suppress every detail, of his failures, whenever there is any possibility of so doing. You can cite, I know, plenty of cases in which, even after the lapse of years, the crime has been discovered and the criminal has been confronted with his guilt, but----" "In my opinion," piped the shrill voice of an elderly man of clerical aspect, "conscience is the surest detective, after all." "Conscience!" retorted Murdock calmly; "the word is a euphemism. Man gives the name of conscience to his fear of discovery and punishment. There is no such thing as conscience in the criminal who has absolute confidence in his power to escape detection." "But where is the man who can have that superb confidence in himself?" asked Sprague. "His name is probably legion," answered Murdock quickly. "He is the author of every crime whose history remains forever unwritten." "And are these really so numerous?" "Let us see how the case stands in one single class of crime--say, for instance, murder. Whenever the solution of a sensational murder mystery is effected by the detectives, or by their allies, the gentlemen of the press, like our friend Mr. Sturgis, we, the gullible public, vociferously applaud the achievements of these guardians of the public safety, and forthwith proceed to award them a niche in the temple of Fame. So far, so good. But what of the dark mysteries which remain forever unsolved? What of the numerous crimes of which no one ever even knows?" "Oh! come now, Doctor," laughed Sprague, "isn't it rather paradoxical to base your argument on the assumption of crimes of whose very existence you admit you have no knowledge?" Murdock smiled grimly as he replied: "Go to the morgue of any large city, where the unrecognized dead are exposed for identification. Aside from the morbid crowd which is drawn to such a place by uncanny curiosity, you will find that each corpse is anxiously scanned by numbers of people, each of whom is seeking a missing friend or relative. At the most, each body can furnish the key to only one mystery. Then what of the scores, ay, the hundreds of others?" After a short pause, he continued: