The Musgrave Ritual

An 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 a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has
made me rather more lax than befits a medical 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 humors,
would sit in an arm-chair 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 fro 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 common-place 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 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.