old, at will. He carries the employment
of rubber and wax insets very far indeed. His nose, his cheeks, his
mouth, his chin may be forced by internal packing to take to
themselves any shape. I made a hasty calculation that he can change
his appearance in seven hundred and twenty different ways. "So many as
that?" said Dawson, surprised when I told him. "I don't think that I
have gone beyond sixty." I assured him that on strict mathematical
principles I had arrived at the limiting number, and it gave him
pleasure to feel that so many untried permutations of countenance
remained to him. In actual everyday practice there are rarely more
than six Dawsons in being at the same time. He finds that number
sufficient for all useful purposes; a greater number, he says, would
excessively strain his memory. He has, you see, always to remember
which Dawson he is at any moment. When he was pulling my leg, or that
of his brave enemy Froissart, the number multiplied greatly, but, as a
working business rule, he is modestly content with six. "I suppose," I
asked, "that here in Acacia Villas you are always the genuine
article."

"Always," he declared with emphasis. "Once," he went on, "I tried to
play a game on Emma. I came home as one of the others, forced my way
into the house, and was clouted over the head and chucked into the
street. When I got back to the Yard to alter myself--for I had left my
tools there--Emma had been telephoning to me to get the wicked
stranger arrested for house-breaking. I never tried any more games;
women have no sense of humour." He shuddered. Dawson is afraid of his
wife, and I pictured to myself a great haughty woman with the figure
and arms of a Juno.

But when Clara--who asked kindly after my little Jane--had summoned us
to the dining-room, I was presented to a small, quiet mouse of a woman
whose head reached no higher than Dawson's heart. This was the
redoubtable Emma! "Did she really clout you over the head and chuck
you into the street?" I whispered. "She did, sir!" he replied,
smiling. "She threw me yards over my own doorstep."

Between Dawson and his little wife there is a very tender affection.
In her eyes he is not a police officer, but an inspired preacher. She
knows nothing of his professional triumphs, and would not care to
know. She, I am very sure, will never trouble to read this book. To
her he is the lover of her youth, the most tender of husbands, and a
Boanerges who spends his Sabbath