The Last Galley »

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits, which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist, but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducer's "death" in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.

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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
Ill THROUGH THE VEIL HE WAS a great shock-headed, freckle-faced Borderer, the lineal descendant of a cattle- thieving clan in Liddesdale. In spite of his ancestry he was as solid and sober a citizen as one would wish to see, a town councillor of Mel- rose, an elder of the church, and the chairman of the local branch of the Young Men's Christian Association. Brown was his name — and you saw it printed up as "Brown and Handiside" over the great grocery stores in the High Street. His wife, Maggie Brown, was an Armstrong before her marriage, and came from an old farming stock in the wilds of Teviothead. She was small, swarthy, and dark eyed, with a strangely nervous temperament for a Scotch woman. No greater contrast could be found than the big tawny man and the dark little woman, but both were of the soil as far back as any memory could extend. One day — it was the first anniversary of their wedding — they had driven over together to see the excavations of the Roman fort at Newstead. It was not a particularly picturesque spot. Fromthe northern bank of the Tweed, just where the river forms a loop, there extends a gentle slope of arable land. Across it run the trenches of the excavators, with here and there an exposure of old stone work to show the foundations of the ancient walls. It had been a huge place, for the camp was fifty acres in extent, and the fort fifteen. However, it was all made easy for them since Mr. Brown knew the farmer to whom the land belonged. Under his guidancethey spent a long summer evening inspecting the trenches, the pits, the ramparts, and all the strange variety of objects which were waiting to be transported to the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities. The buckle of a woman's belt had been dug up that very day, and the farmer was discoursing upon it wh...

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A collection of 17 works of the great storyteller reprinted from the 1908 McClure Co. edition. These horror stories manifest the skill and ingenuity of the Holmes canon. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)