here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is

Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch

of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s

carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now,

Doctor, we’ve done our work, so it’s time we had some play. A

sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is

sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex

us with their conundrums.”


My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable

performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the

stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin

fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid,

dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuth-hound, Holmes the

relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to

conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted

itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often

thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which

occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme

languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly

formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid

his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of

the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power

would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with

his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that

of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at

St. James’s Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom

he had set himself to hunt down.