| Of
all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was
the means of introducing to his notice -- that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that
of Colonel Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a finer
field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in its
inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of being
placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive
methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results. The story has,
I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but, like all such narratives,
its effect is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column
of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery
clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to
the complete truth. At the time the circumstances made a deep impression upon
me, and the lapse of two years has hardly served to weaken the effect. It
was in the summer of '89, not long after my marriage, that the events occurred
which I am now about to summarize. I had returned to civil practice and had finally
abandoned Holmes in his Baker Street rooms, although I continually visited him
and occasionally even persuaded him to forgo his Bohemian habits so far as to
come and visit us. My practice had steadily increased, and as I happened to live
at no very great distance from Paddington Station, I got a few patients from among
the officials. One of these, whom I had cured of a painful and lingering disease,
was never weary of advertising my virtues and of endeavouring to send me on every
sufferer over whom he might have any influence. |
