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choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental qualities
of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to select
those which presented the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field
for his talents. It is, however, unfortunately impossible entirely to separate
the sensational from the criminal, and a chronicler is left in the dilemma that
he must either sacrifice details which are essential to his statement and so give
a false impression of the problem, or he must use matter which chance, and not
choice, has provided him with. With this short preface I shall turn to my notes
of what proved to be a strange, though a peculiarly terrible, chain of events. It
was a blazing hot day in August. Baker Street was like an oven, and the glare
of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of the house across the road was painful
to the eye. It was hard to believe that these were the same walls which loomed
so gloomily through the fogs of winter. Our blinds were half-drawn, and Holmes
lay curled upon the sofa, reading and re-reading a letter which he had received
by the morning post. For myself, my term of service in India had trained me to
stand heat better than cold, and a thermometer at ninety was no hardship. But
the morning paper was uninteresting. Parliament had risen. Everybody was out of
town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the shingle of Southsea.
A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion,
neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He
loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments
stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or
suspicion of unsolved crime. Appreciation of nature found no place among his many
gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the
town to track down his brother of the country.
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