![]() ![]() He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength, both physically and mentally. "There had been a daughter, I heard, but she had died of diphtheria while on a visit to Birmingham. "Trevor senior was a widower, and my friend his only son. There was excellent wild-duck shooting in the fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select library, taken over, as I understood, from a former occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that he would be a fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month there. The house was and old-fashioned, wide-spread, oak-beamed brick building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to it. Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads. "Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and consideration, a J.P., and a landed proprietor. Finally, he invited me down to his father's place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow, full of spirits and energy, the very opposite to me in most respects, but we had some subjects in common, and it was a bond of union when I found that he was as friendless as I. At first it was only a minute's chat, but soon his visits lengthened, and before the end of the term we were close friends. I was laid by the heels for ten days, but Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. "It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it was effective. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we had no points of contact at all. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year. "He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college. "You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?" he asked. ![]() Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and turning them over. Now he sat forward in this arm chair and spread out the documents upon his knees. I had often endeavored to elicit from my companion what had first turned is mind in the direction of criminal research, but had never caught him before in a communicative humor. "Because it was the first in which I was ever engaged." "But why did you say just now that there were very particular reasons why I should study this case?" Yet the fact remains that the reader, who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down by it as if it had been the butt end of a pistol." ![]() It seems to me to be rather grotesque than otherwise." "I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire horror. "Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, had been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant's life."Īs I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message, I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face. "The supply of game for London is going steadily up," it ran. He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate gray-paper. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it." I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock Holmes, as we sat one winter's night on either side of the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over. ![]()
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