The Resident Patient

Glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of
Memoirs with which I have endeavored 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 tern of service
in India had trained me to stand heat better than
cold, and a thermometer of 90 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 rumor 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 evil-doer
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.

"You are right, Watson," said he. "It does seem a
very preposterous way of