"To the man who loves R for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish to the point of outrageous distortion, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province."
"And yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records. Because I can embroider a simple act like your lighting a pipe into a mammoth best seller"
"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood–"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."
"Thus it is that I come to my latest case, that of the Giant R of Greencastle, Indiana. I suppose you can embellish this little nothing of a case into a great mystery and garner us bundles of cold, hard cash. It was a slow news day and so I took up the paper and discovered a tiny filler piece buried at the bottom of the sports section, close aboard an ad for a nightclub featuring scantily clad women gyrating to loud music. Which I didn't even look at, really. The tiny clump of newsprint described the theft and subsequent return of dozens and dozens of R's from signs all about Greencastle. The police, being more familiar with minding their P's and Q's were baffled. For who would take dozens of letters from signs all over town, but taking none but the letter R. Then return all the ill-gotten R's in a box left in front of the police station itself.
"I promptly boarded a train to go to Greencastle but misread the schedule and ended up in Albuquerque. See if you can whip that into a masterful and salable bit of prose, won't you, Watson? I'm running low on tobacco."
