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I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years
'82 and '90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features
that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however,
have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not offered
a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a degree,
and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some, too, have baffled
his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending,
while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded
rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was
so dear to him. There is, however, one of these last which was so remarkable in
its details and so startling in its results that I am tempted to give some account
of it in spite of the fact that there are points in connection with it which never
have been, and probably never will be, entirely cleared up. The
year '87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest,
of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months
I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant
Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse,
of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque Sophy Anderson, of
the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally
of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered, Sherlock
Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man's watch, to prove that it had been
wound up two hours before, and that therefore the deceased had gone to bed within
that time -- a deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the
case. All these I may sketch out at some future date, but none of them present
such singular features as the strange train of circumstances which I have now
taken up my pen to describe.
It was in the latter days of September, and
the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had
screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the
heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant
from the routine of life and to recognize the presence of those great elemental
forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed
beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the
wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily
at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the
other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories until the howl of the
gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to
lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her
mother's, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker
Street.
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