At any rate, he lived in the midst of it.

The realism which was his metier was that sort of realism into which are woven facts and incidents of the most bizarre and startling nature.
And, certainly, behind the light blue eyes that could look with such apparent ingenuousness out of his plump, bland face there was the subtle mind of a psychologist.

Barnstable, true to his attitude of the plain business man, would have been the first to ridicule the idea publicly if anyone had dubbed him "the psychological detective." That, to his mind, would have savored of charlatanism.

He would have said: "I am nothing so strange and mystifying as that--I am a plain business man." But in reality there was no new discovery of the investigating psychologists of which he did not avail himself at once.

His ability to clothe himself with the thoughts of the criminal as an actor clothes himself with a role, was marvelous; he knew the criminal soul.