en you first spoke to me, why should you not
wish your brother to overhear what you said? There is nothing to
which he, or anyone else, could object."

"My brother is very anxious to have the Hall inhabited, for he
thinks it is for the good of the poor folk upon the moor. He
would be very angry if he knew that I have said anything which
might induce Sir Henry to go away. But I have done my duty now
and I will say no more. I must get back, or he will miss me and
suspect that I have seen you. Good-bye!" She turned and had
disappeared in a few minutes among the scattered boulders, while
I, with my soul full of vague fears, pursued my way to
Baskerville Hall.

Chapter 8

First Report of Dr. Watson

From this point onward I will follow the course of events by
transcribing my own letters to Mr. Sherlock Holmes which lie
before me on the table. One page is missing, but otherwise they
are exactly as written and show my feelings and suspicions of the
moment more accurately than my memory, clear as it is upon these
tragic events, can possibly do.

BASKERVILLE HALL, October 13th.

MY DEAR HOLMES,--My previous letters and telegrams have kept you
pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most
God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the
more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its
vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its
bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but
on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and
the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you
walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves
and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their
temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred
hill-sides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to
see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a
flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel
that his presence there was more natural than your own. The
strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what
must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian,
but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried
race who were forced to accept that which none other would
occupy.

All this, however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me
and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely
practical mind. I