his tattooed but muscular wrist, just ready to take his fifth
shot in the arm since breakfast, when all of a sudden there was a
terrible clatter and racket down at our front door; we heard the door
jerked open and then slammed shut; somebody rushed up the stairway
three steps at a time; our own door was kicked open, and a tall,
bald-headed man, about forty years old, wearing a monocle in his right
eye, and with a derby hat in one hand, and a wet, streaming umbrella
in the other, stood before us.

"Say! The cuff-buttons are gone,--the cuff-buttons are gone! One pair
of them, anyhow. Come quick! The earl is nearly wild about it. Money's
no object to him!" the apparition yelled at us.

I was so completely taken aback by the way that chump had burst in on
us that I spilled all the beautiful tobacco off the cigarette-paper
onto the floor. Holmes, however, like the cold-blooded old cuss that
he always was, didn't even bat an eye, but calmly proceeded to squirt
the cocaine into his wrist, and then, with the usual deep sigh of
contentment, he stretched out full length in the chair, with his arms
above his head, and yawned.

"Well, my hasty friend from Hedge-gutheridge, so you haven't got all
your buttons, eh?" he drawled. "I congratulate you upon your frankness,
as it isn't everybody who will admit it. But sit down, anyhow, and make
yourself at home. Watson has the 'makings' over there; I've got a
cocaine-squirter here you can use, if you wish, and you will find a
nice dish of red winter apples up on the mantelpiece. Beyond the mere
facts that you are a bachelor, live at Hedge-gutheridge in County
Surrey, do a great deal of writing, belong to the Fraternal Order of
Zebras, and shaved yourself very quickly this morning, I know nothing
whatever about you."

Of course, I knew that was the cue for _my_ little song and dance.

"Marvelous! marvelous!" I shouted.

But our visitor was a long ways more surprised than I was. He flopped
down in a chair, stared at Holmes as if he were a ghost, and said:

"Good Lord! How in thunder did you get onto all that?"

My eminent friend smiled his old crafty smile, as he waved his hands,
and replied:

"Why, you poor simp, it's all as plain as that little round
window-pane called a monocle that you've got stuck in your eye there.
I knew right away that you were a bachelor, because there is a general
air of seediness about you and two buttons are missing from your vest;
I knew that you liv