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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle

Contents


I. A Scandal in Bohemia


II. The Red-Headed League


III. A Case of Identity


IV. The Boscombe Valley Mystery


V. The Five Orange Pips


VI. 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.A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
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. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up