MR. ELTHORNE AT HOMEMr. Robert Cardwell must not be pictured as a sharp-faced sleuth, with the faculties and the instincts of the born investigator of crime. He was anything but sharp-faced, and his tastes were for books and pleasant company rather than for facts and hard work. He liked to exercise his wits on criminal problems in the abstract; he took a keen intellectual pleasure in piecing fragments of evidence together and deducing events from them; but the business of arduously hunting for clues and practically tracing the criminal himself was not much to his mind. To the concrete cases which came his way he brought no more specialized faculties than a wide experience of men and books, and a habit of lucid and logical thinking; which latter, of course, is rare enough. And while he was
