we adjourned to the
library, and Holmes settled himself in the best chair, still wearing
Luigi Vermicelli's light green livery, consulted his old chronometer
again, and yawned.

"Well, it's still only a quarter of one. Hi! Ho! Hum! Nearly four
hours yet before I am to go down to the village and grab the second
gardener with his stolen pair of diamonds!" he remarked. Then turning
to me, he added: "Doc, I believe the reaction is on me now. I haven't
had a shot in the arm since yesterday morning. Have you got the
dope-needle with you? No, that's right,--I have it here in my pocket."

And before I could prevent him, the hardened old "coke"-fiend had
pulled out his famous needle and inoculated himself again in the arm
with the poisonous cocaine, and right in front of all the five people
in the library, too,--the Earl, Thorneycroft, Launcelot, Tooter, and
Hicks,--who stared at him as if he were a dime-museum freak; which
indeed he was, to a certain extent.

The seven of us managed to kill time some way or another that
Wednesday afternoon, while the sun shone through the ancient windows,
and the birds sang their springtime songs in the trees outside, the
Countess having retired to the music room to hammer Beethoven,--or
maybe it was Mendelssohn,--out of the piano.

I had grown considerably interested in a very romantic novel by Xavier
de Montepin, and took no note of the passage of time until suddenly my
unconventional partner jumped up and yelled:

"Arise and depart with me, John H. Watson, M. D.! The time now
approaches when we shall accomplish the recovery of the sixth and
seventh stolen piece of glass for His Nibs the Earl!"

And Holmes grabbed me by the shoulder so sharply that the book fell
out of my hands.

"You don't need to throw a fit about it, anyhow," I grumbled, as I
hastened to accompany him out of the castle and down the somewhat
dusty road to the village of Hedge-gutheridge.

The darned village was three-quarters of a mile from Normanstow
Towers, and I didn't feel like taking a tramp just then, but Holmes
seemed to be in high spirits as we passed along the ancient and
dilapidated main street of the village, sizing up the signs above the
stores until we came to one that read:

WILFRED WUXLEY
FLOUR and FEED

It didn't look very inviting, being only a hundred feet away from the
grimy railroad station by which we had first come here, with cinders
blown all over it, and if the build