When he was four year old (at any rate, so his mother will take her oath upon) Sam said he’d be a policeman, and at twenty-four year old a policeman he became.  What’s more, chance ordained that he should follow his high calling in the village where he was born, and though the general opinion is that a lad, who goes into the civil forces, be like to perform better away from his surroundings, where he was just a common object of the countryside with none of the dignities of the law attaching to him, yet in this case it fell out otherwise and Borlase left home to become a policeman and in due course returned, the finished article.

Naturally with such a history behind him and the ambition of a lifetime to fall back upon, the authorities found no difficulty with Samuel, because he had a policeman’s mind and a policeman’s bearing and outlook upon life from his youth up.  He thought like a policeman about the mysteries of existence; he regarded his neighbours with a policeman’s inquiring eyes, because a policeman has a particular glance, as you’ll find if you have much to do with ’em; and he moved like a policeman with the might and majesty of law and order ever before his eyes.

He confessed in later time that he pushed his great theories of perfection rather hard in his earlier years; and he came back to his native village of Thorpe-Michael full of high intentions to lift the place higher than where it already stood.  He had an unyielding habit of tidiness and hated to see children playing in a road; and he hated worse to see a motor-car come faster round a corner than it did ought; or any sign of unsteady steps in a man or woman, who’d stopped too long at the ‘Queen Anne’ public-house, or anything like that.  He weren’t what you might call an amusing man and he hadn’t yet reached the stage to make allowances and keep his weather eye shut when the occasion demanded it; but these high branches of understanding was likely to develop in time, and Inspector Chowne, who ruled over him when these things fell out, always held of Samuel Borlase that the material was there and the man hadn’t took up his calling without promising gifts to justify it.

“I’d sooner see him fussy than careless,” said Chowne, “because life cures a chap of being fussy, if he’s got a brain and a sensible outlook; but the careless and slack sort go from bad to worse, and I ain’t here to keep my constables in order:  they be here to strengthen my hands and keep the rest of the people in order.”

He didn’t judge as Samuel would ever rise to the top of the tree, any more than what he’d done himself; for Chowne was one who had long lost illusions as to a leading place.  He’d made a woeful mess of the only murder case that ever happened to him, and he well knew that anything like great gifts were denied him.  But he saw in Samuel such another as himself and judged that Borlase was born to do his duty in the place to which he had been called, and would run his course and take his pension without any of the fierce light of fame.