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BEING DETECTIVES
35

—single-handed, you know, or with only my faithful bloodhound."

She stroked Pincher's ears, but he had gone to sleep because he knew well enough that all the suet pudding was finished. He is a very sensible dog.

"You always get hold of the wrong end of the stick," Oswald said. "You can't choose what crimes you'll be a detective about. You just have to get a suspicious circumstance, and then you look for a clue and follow it up. Whether it turns out a murder or a missing will is just a fluke."

"That's one way," Dicky said. "Another is to get a paper and find two advertisements or bits of news that fit. Like this: 'Young Lady Missing,' and then it tells about all the clothes she had on, and the gold locket she wore, and the colour of her hair, and all that; and then in another piece of the paper you see, 'Gold locket found,' and then it all comes out."

We sent H. O. for the paper at once, but we could not make any of the things fit in. The two best were about how some burglars broke into a place in Holloway where they made preserved tongues and invalid delicacies, and carried off a lot of them. And on another