The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences
and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and
intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually
been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to
publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause
was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a
successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some
orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the
general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this
attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of
interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay
very few of my records before the public. My participation in
some if his adventures was always a privilege which entailed
discretion and reticence upon me.

It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a
telegram from Homes last Tuesday--he has never been known to
write where a telegram would serve--in the following terms:

Why not tell them of the Cornish horror--strangest case I have
handled.

I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the
matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire
that I should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling
telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the
exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before my
readers.

It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's iron
constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of
constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps,
by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year
Dr. Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to
Holmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the
famous private agent lay aside all his cases and surrender
himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute
breakdown. The state of his health was not a matter in which he
himself took the faintest interest, for his mental detachment was
absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being
permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete
change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of
that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near
Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.

It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the
grim humour of my patient. From the windows of our little
whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we
looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay,
that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black
cliffs and