"It saved me from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas! I already
feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort
to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little
problems help me to do so."

"And you are a benefactor of the race," said I.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, perhaps, after all, it is of
some little use," he remarked. "'L'homme c'est rien--l'oeuvre
c'est tout,' as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand."



ADVENTURE III. A CASE OF IDENTITY

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side
of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely
stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We
would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere
commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window
hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the
roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the
strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the
wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and
leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with
its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
unprofitable."

"And yet I am not convinced of it," I answered. "The cases which