Page:Mystery of the Yellow Room (Grosset Dunlap 1908).djvu/209

 hour I busied myself with the common, ordinary work of a policeman. Like the least intelligent of detectives I went on blindly over the traces of footprints which told me just no more than they could.

"I came to the conclusion that I was a fool, lower in the scale of intelligence than even the police of the modern romancer. Novelists build mountains of stupidity out of a footprint on the sand, or from an impression of a hand on the wall.  That's the way innocent men are brought to prison.  It might convince an examining magistrate or the head of a detective department, but it's not proof.  You writers forget that what the senses furnish is notproof.  If I am taking cognisance of what is offered me by my senses I do so but to bring the results within the circle of my reason.  That circle may be the most circumscribed, but if it is, it has this advantage—it holds nothing but the truth!  Yes, I swear that I have never used the evidence of the senses but as servants to my reason.  I have never permitted them to become my master.  They have not made of me that monstrous thing,—worse than a blind man,—a man who sees falsely. And that is why I can triumph over your error and your merely animal intelligence, Frédéric Larsan.

"Be of good courage, then, friend Rouletabille; it is impossible that the incident of the inexplicable gallery should be outside the circle of your reason. You know that!  Then have faith and take thought with yourself and forget not that you took hold of the right end when you drew that circle in your