OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK
HOLMES ***




The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle


Contents

   I
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
   V
The Man with the Twisted Lip
   VII
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
   VIII
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
   IX
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
   X
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
   XI
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
   XII
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches




I
To Sherlock Holmes she is always _the_ woman
I have seldom heard him
mention her under any other name
In his eyes she eclipses and
predominates the whole of her sex
It was not that he felt any emotion
akin to love for Irene Adler
All emotions, and that one particularly,
were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind
He
was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that
the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a
false position
He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe
and a sneer
They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for
drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions
But for the trained
reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely
adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might
throw a doubt upon all his mental results
Grit in a sensitive
instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not
be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his
And
yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene
Adler, of dubious and questionable memory
I had seen little of Holmes lately
My marriage had drifted us away
from each other
Beyond these signs of
his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of
the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion
One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning from a
journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when
my way led me through Baker Street
His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I
looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette
against the blind
He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his
head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him
To me, who
knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own
story
He had risen out of his drug-created
dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem
I rang the bell
and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own
It seldom was; but he was glad, I think,
to see me
With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved
me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a
spirit case and a gasogene in the corner
Then he stood before the fire
and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion
“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked
“I think, Watson, that you have put
on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”

“Seven!” I answered
“Indeed, I should have thought a little more
Just a trifle more, I
fancy, Watson
And in practice again, I observe
You did not tell me
that you intended to go into harness.”

“Then, how do you know?”

“I see it, I deduce it
How do I know that you have been getting
yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless
servant girl?”

“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much
You would certainly have
been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago
It is true that I had a
country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I
have changed my clothes I can’t imagine how you deduce it
As to Mary
Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there,
again, I fail to see how you work it out.”

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together
“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on the inside
of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is
scored by six almost parallel cuts
Obviously they have been caused by
someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in
order to remove crusted mud from it
Hence, you see, my double
deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a
particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey
And yet I
believe that my eyes are as good as yours.”

“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself
down into an armchair
“You see, but you do not observe
For example, you have frequently seen the steps
which lead up from the hall to this room.”

“Frequently.”

“How often?”

“Well, some hundreds of times.”

“Then how many are there?”

“How many
Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have
both seen and observed
“It came by the last post,” said he