Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend,
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our
intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of intro-
ducing to his notice -- that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of
Colonel Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have
afforded a finer field for an acute and original observer, but the
other was so strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details
that it may be the more worthy of being placed upon record,
even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive
methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable
results. The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the
newspapers, but, like all such narratives, its effect is much less
striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print
than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the
mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a
step which leads on to the complete truth. At the time the
circumstances made a deep impression upon me, and the lapse of
two years has hardly served to weaken the effect.