A change: from the great out doors of yesterday, and fishing for trout, to one of the greatest indoors men of all: Sherlock Holmes. A turnout of books brought to the surface three heavy volumes, bound copies of the Strand Magazine of over a century ago. Six months of the magazine per volume; blue hard cover, January to June 1893, in which are six of Conan Doyle's famous short stories about the detective. The previous owner bought these three at sixpence apiece from sixty years ago.
Anyway here is Watson complaining about the untidiness of his friend. Not that the doctor himself hadn't seen some rough and tumble in his campaigning in Afghanistan - but Holmes "there is a limit and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack knife into the very centre of his mantlepiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs."
There is much more. "I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm chair, with his hair trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room, was improved by it."
This is on the opening page of adventure XVIII: The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual. Not one of his best: the train down to Sussex, the huge oak tree, 23 feet in girth, the stump on an elm, a hidden cellar and a dead butler. In some ways the best thing about this tale is, as so often, the fine illustrations, signed merely SP. Was it Sidney Paget or Page? Anyway, no picture of Holmes remains more in the mind than these drawings, fine hawkish profile, dignified, slim figure. And even the lesser of Conan Doyle's stories have an attraction, a quaintness, an enduring, endearing quality.