His Last Bow

"Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H."

It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.

Some fumes which are not poisonous would be a welcome change.

I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one's self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.

But I have reasons to suppose that this opinion would be very much more frank and valuable if he imagines that we are alone.

I give you my word that for three days I have tasted neither food nor drink until you were good enough to pour me out that glass of water. But it is the tobacco which I find most irksome.

"I followed you.""I saw no one.""That is what you may expect to see when I follow you."

We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I have heard your reasons and regard them as unconvincing and inadequate. We will pass that.

There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.

Surely the clearest proof of it is that, knowing what I know, I have sent for you and not for the police.

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

Education never ends Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way of the official police force.

We are devil-ridden, Mr. Holmes! My poor parish is devil-ridden! Satan himself is loose in it! We are given over into his hands!

I think, Watson, that I shall resume that course of tobacco-poisoning which you have so often and so justly condemned.

"Think of Mycroft's note, of the Admiralty, the Cabinet, the exalted person who waits for news. We are bound to go."

My answer was to rise from the table.

"You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go."

I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back upon such a theory as this.

Holmes, you are not yourself. A sick man is but a child.

Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem.

You fidget me beyond endurance. You, a doctor — you are enough to drive a patient into an asylum.

You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!

Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph.

There is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear.

Three days of absolute fast does not improve one's beauty, Watson.