gravely at him from out the shining surface, like a mandarin.
This morning the detective was unusually animated in his
confidences to his mirror. At times, too, a puzzled expression would
pass over his face. The hansom cab murder had been placed in his hands
for solution, and he was trying to think how he should make a
beginning.

"Hang it," he said, thoughtfully stropping his razor, "a thing with an
end must have a start, and if I don't get the start how am I to get the
end?"

As the mirror did not answer this question, Mr. Gorby lathered his
face, and started shaving in a somewhat mechanical fashion, for his
thoughts were with the case, and ran on in this manner:--

"Here's a man--well, say a gentleman--who gets drunk, and, therefore,
don't know what he's up to. Another gent who is on the square comes up
and sings out for a cab for him--first he says he don't know him, and
then he shows plainly he does--he walks away in a temper, changes his
mind, comes back and gets into the cab, after telling the cabby to
drive down to St. Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with
chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting
out at Powlett Street, vanishes--that's the riddle I've got to find
out, and I don't think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are
three things to be discovered--First, who is the dead man? Second,
what was he killed for? And third, who did it?

"Once I get hold of the first the other two won't be very hard to find out,
for one can tell pretty well from a man's life whether it's to anyone's
interest that he should be got off the books. The man that murdered that