looked into the detective's room across a little alleyway ten or twelve
feet wide, ambushed themselves in it, and cut some peep-holes in the
window-blind. Mr. Holmes's blinds were down; but by and by he raised
them. It gave the spies a hair-lifting but pleasurable thrill to find
themselves face to face with the Extraordinary Man who had filled the
world with the fame of his more than human ingenuities. There he sat
--not a myth, not a shadow, but real, alive, compact of substance, and
almost within touching distance with the hand.

"Look at that head!" said Ferguson, in an awed voice. "By gracious!
that's a head!"

"You bet!" said the blacksmith, with deep reverence. "Look at his nose!
look at his eyes! Intellect? Just a battery of it!"

"And that paleness," said Ham Sandwich. "Comes from thought--that's what
it comes from. Hell! duffers like us don't know what real thought is."

"No more we don't," said Ferguson. "What we take for thinking is just
blubber-and-slush."

"Right you are, Wells-Fargo. And look at that frown--that's deep
thinking--away down, down, forty fathom into the bowels of things. He's
on the track of something."

"Well, he is, and don't you forget it. Say--look at that awful gravity
--look at that pallid solemness--there ain't any corpse can lay over it."

"No, sir, not for dollars! And it's his'n by hereditary rights, too;
he's been dead four times a'ready, and there's history for it. Three