| In
glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavoured
to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples
which shall in every way answer my purpose. For in those cases in which Holmes
has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated
the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have
often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying
them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he
has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable
and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining
their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish. The
small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of "A Study in Scarlet,"
and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve
as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis which are forever threatening the historian.
It may be that in the business of which I am now about to write the part which
my friend played is not sufficiently accentuated; and yet the whole train of circumstances
is so remarkable that I cannot bring myself to omit it entirely from this series. It
had been a close, rainy day in October. 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 of ninety was no hardship. But
the 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 evildoer of the town to track
down his brother of the country.
Finding that Holmes was too absorbed
for conversation, I had tossed aside the barren paper, and, leaning back in my
chair I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion's voice broke in upon my
thoughts.
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