Explore "Dr Thorndyke Intervenes" by R. Austin Freeman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Modern transport appliances have certain undeniable advantages, particularly to those who are principally concerned with rapidity of transit. But these advantages, like most of the gifts of "progress," have to be purchased by the sacrifice of certain other advantages. The Superintendent's car was, in respect of speed, incomparably superior to a horse carriage; but in the opportunity that it afforded for sustained conversation it compared very unfavourably with that obsolete type of vehicle. Thorndyke, however, not yet, perhaps, emancipated from the hansom cab habit, chose to disregard the inevitable interruption, and, as the car trundled smoothly westward, remarked to Miller: "The subject of coffins, with which our minds are at present occupied, suggests, by an obvious analogy, that of a head in a box. I promised, a little while ago, to pass on to you any facts that I might unearth respecting the history of that head. I have looked into the matter and I think I now have all the material facts; and I may say that the affair turns out to be, in effect, what I had, almost from the first, supposed it to be."
"I didn't know," said Miller, "that you supposed it to be anything. I thought you were quite uninterested in the incident."