nd was hot upon the
scent of some new problem. I rang the bell, and was shown up to the
chamber which had formerly been in part my own.

His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to
see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to
an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case
and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire, and looked me
over in his singular introspective fashion.

"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have put on
seven and a half pounds since I saw you."

"Seven," I answered.

"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy,
Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you
intended to go into harness."

"Then how do you know?"

"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself
very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant
girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have been
burned had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country
walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess; but as I have changed
my clothes, I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is
incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice; but there again I fail to
see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he, "my eyes tell me that on the inside of
your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored
by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by some one
who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to
remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you
had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant
boot-slicking specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a
gentleman walks into my rooms, smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of
nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the side of
his top hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull
indeed if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical
profession."

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he, explained his process
of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing
always appears to me so ridiculously simple that I coul