The Disappearance of Daniel Question

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Early this summer I went down to Sussex, as I do often nowadays, to pass a few days with my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes and to blow the sooty air of London out of my lungs. He greeted me in typical fashion. "Watson!" he exclaimed, "I do believe that you have added a full six pounds since you were last here."

"I had thought it more like three or four," I said. "I see that you are still well," for he was as upright as ever, had added no weight, and his hair was only slightly touched with silver.

He laughed. "The product of my little makers of sweetness will see me through a good few years yet."

That evening, after Martha, Holmes’ housekeeper, had gone, Holmes and I settled on either side of the fireplace in his study, a room not dissimilar in its untidiness to our old sitting room at Baker Street. Here were the old brass coal-scuttle, the Persian slipper filled with tobacco, other old friends including the shelves of Holmes’ invaluable scrapbooks, and there was still a table littered with his chemical apparatus, though I have no doubt it is now devoted to the mysteries of apiculture rather than the defining of poisonous alkaloids.

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