r contents of the
ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes
also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret,
the Boulevard assassin--an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph
letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion
of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole
I am of opinion that none of them unites so many singular points of
interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes not only the
lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent
developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the
crime.

It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November.
Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a
powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon
a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery. Outside the
wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the
windows. It was strange there, in the very depths of the town, with ten
miles of man's handiwork on every side of us, to feel the iron grip of
Nature, and to be conscious that to the huge elemental forces all London
was no more than the molehills that dot the fields. I walked to the
window, and looked out on the deserted street. The occasional lamps
gleamed on the expanse of muddy road and shining pavement. A single cab
was splashing its way from the Oxford Street end.

"Well, Watson, it's as well we have not to turn out to-night," said
Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest. "I've done
enough for one sitting. It is trying work for the eyes. So far as I can
make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey's accounts dating
from the second half of the fifteenth century. Halloa! halloa! halloa!
What's this?"

Amid the droning of the wind there had come the stamping of a horse's
hoofs, and the long grind of a wheel as it rasped against the curb. The
cab which I had seen had pulled up at our door.

"What can he want?" I ejaculated, as a man stepped out of it.

"Want? He wants us. And we, my poor Watson, want overcoats and cravats
and goloshes, and every aid that man ever invented to fight the weather.
Wait a bit, though! There's the cab off again! There's hope yet. He'd
have kept it if he had wanted us to come. Run down, my dear fellow, and
open the door, for all virtuous folk have been long in bed."

When th