in the fears which fill
me, now that he has gone from me to his other victim with threats upon
his tongue.'

"Underneath is written in a hand so shaky as to be hardly legible,
'Beddoes writes in cipher to say H. Has told all. Sweet Lord, have mercy
on our souls!'

"That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and I
think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one.
The good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea
planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and
Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on which
the letter of warning was written. They both disappeared utterly and
completely. No complaint had been lodged with the police, so that
Beddoes had mistaken a threat for a deed. Hudson had been seen lurking
about, and it was believed by the police that he had done away with
Beddoes and had fled. For myself I believe that the truth was exactly
the opposite. I think that it is most probable that Beddoes, pushed to
desperation and believing himself to have been already betrayed, had
revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from the country with as much
money as he could lay his hands on. Those are the facts of the case,
Doctor, and if they are of any use to your collection, I am sure that
they are very heartily at your service."

Adventure V. The Musgrave Ritual

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock
Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest
and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain
quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one
of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction.
Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The
rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural
Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a
medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who
keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of
a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a
jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin
to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol
practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in
one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger
and a hun