"A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military
salute with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.



CHAPTER IV

THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet;
he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred
of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early
in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly
of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame
tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a
rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in
which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his
uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an
unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His
father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for
simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years,
was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of
absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The
more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more
did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the
time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had
pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from
infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into