their own story. He was at
work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and 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
someone 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 reaso