In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences andinteresting recollections which I associate with my long and intimatefriendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced bydifficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombreand cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, andnothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to handover the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen witha mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. Itwas indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly notany lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years tolay very few of my records before the public. My participation in someof his adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion andreticence upon me.
It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegramfrom Holmes last Tuesday--he has never been known to write where atelegram 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 matterfresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire that I shouldrecount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling telegram mayarrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact details of thecase and to lay the narrative before my readers.
It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's ironconstitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constanthard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasionalindiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr. Moore Agar, ofHarley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some dayrecount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent layaside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wishedto avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health was not amatter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mentaldetachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat ofbeing permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a completechange of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of thatyear we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, atthe further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.
It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grimhumour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashedhouse, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon thewhole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailingvessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on whichinnumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it liesplacid and sheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into itfor rest and protection.
Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blistering gale fromthe south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the last battlein the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands far out from thatevil place.
On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It wasa country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-colored, with an occasionalchurch tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In everydirection upon these moors there were traces of some vanished racewhich had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strangemonuments of sto