disappearance of the British royal crown, which somebody had swiped
the same day that Ed kicked the bucket; and of course I had to trail
along with him! Well, to cover up a "narsty" scandal, my unerring
friend, Hemlock Holmes, detected the guilty wretch within two days,
but the culprit was so highly placed in society that the cops couldn't
do a thing to him. In fact, he was one of the dukes, and after King
George, Ed's successor, had recovered the crown,--which was found in
an old battered valise in a corner of the duke's garage,--and had got
a written confession out of him in Holmes's old rooms in Baker Street,
in the presence of myself and Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, we all
swore a solemn oath, on a bound volume of Alfred Austin's poems, that
we would never, never tell who it was that had stolen the English
crown in the year 1910! Wild horses shall not drag from me the name of
that ducal scoundrel, and, besides, there might be a German spy
looking over your shoulder as you read this.

Holmes and I decided to stay back in the tight little isle for a while
after that episode, and there in the same old den, at 221-B Baker
Street, in the city of London, we were domiciled on that eventful
April morning in 1912 that saw us introduced to what turned out to be
positively the dog-gonedest, most mixed-up, perplexing, and mysterious
case we ever bumped up against in all our long and varied career in
Arthur Conan Doyle's dream-pipe. It completely laid over "The Sign of
the Four" and "The Study in Scarlet," and had "The Adventure of the
Blue Carbuncle" all beaten to a frazzle.

To be painfully precise about it, it was just twenty minutes after
nine, Monday morning, April the eighth, 1912, the day after Easter,
and it was raining something fierce outside. The whirling raindrops
pattered against our second-story windows, and occasional thunder and
lightning varied the scene.

Holmes was sitting, or, rather, sprawling in a Morris chair, wrapped
in his old lavender dressing-gown, and was wearing the red Turkish
slippers King George had given him for Christmas a few months before.
He had his little old bottle of cocaine on the table beside him, and
his dope-needle, which he had just filled, in his hand. I was sitting
on the opposite side of the littered-up table, engaged in rolling a
pill, that is to say, a coffin-nail. I had just poured out the tobacco
into the rice-paper, and Hemlock Holmes had pulled back his left cuff,
baring