The "Gloria Scott"

I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock
Holmes, as we sat one winter's night on either side of
the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would
be worth your while to glance over. These are the
documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria
Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of
the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it."

He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished
cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short
note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate gray-paper.

"The supply of game for London is going steadily up,"
it ran. "Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, had been now
told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for
preservation of you hen-pheasant's life."

As I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message,
I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face.

"You look a little bewildered," said he.

"I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire
horror. It seems to me to be rather grotesque than
otherwise."

"Very likely. Yet the fact remains that the reader,
who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down
by it as if it had been the butt end of a pistol."

"You arouse my curiosity," said I. "But why did you
say just now that there were very particular reasons
why I should study this case?"

"Because it was the first in which I was ever
engaged."

I had often endeavored to elicit from my companion
what had first turned is mind in the direction of
criminal research, but had never caught him before in
a communicative humor. Now he sat forward in this arm
chair and spread out the documents upon his knees.
Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and
turning them over.

"You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?" he asked.
"He was the only friend I made during the two years I
was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow,
Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and
working out my own little methods of thought, so that
I never mixed much with the men of my year. Bar
fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then
my line of study was quite distinct from that of the
other fellows, so that we had no pints of contact at
all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only
through the accident of his bull terrier freezing on
to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.

"It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it
was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days,
but Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At
first it was only a minute's chat, but soon his visits
lengthened, and before the end of the term we were
close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow,
full