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anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was
that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical
of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he
was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever
drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional
in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the
top of natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits
a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his
cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and
his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre
of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always
held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and
when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger
and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic
V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the
appearance of our room was improved by it. Our
chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way
of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or
in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror
of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases,
and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket
and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs,
the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with
which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which
he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the
sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated until every corner
of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to
be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter's night,
as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished
pasting extracts into his commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours
in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my
request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he
returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle
of the floor, and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the
lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up
with red tape into separate packages.
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