Life — October 18, 1894 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

250 THE RECRUDESCENCE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. (With apologies to Dr. A, Conan Doyle.) Sy D° what I would on the day of my arrival in ON America I could not drive Cer > the thought of Sherlock ‘ \ . | 7 Holmes out of my mind. ® Perhaps it was because every one @ — “of the reporters who came to interview me about my lecturing tour made enquiries about the great detective, and perhaps it was because I could not help thinking what a good thing it would be to have him with me to illustrate my personal recollections, The more | thought it over the less likely it seemed that a man of Holmes’s intellectual resources should injure himself —much less allow himself to be killed—by falling a few hundred feet over a cliff into the ocean. 1 remembered that he had once told me that he had made a special study of falling from high places, and that it was largely owing to his facility in this direction that he had made the celebrated capture, in 1879, of O'Rourke Hassan, who for centuries had been stealing the lead pipe from the northeast minaret of the Mosque of Vazir Khan, and for whose apprehension the municipality of Lahore had had a reward standing since the time of Akbar. I was just dressing for dinner—a practice it seems that the Americans have imitated us in—at the club which I was making my residence in New York, when a servant knocked at the door and informed me that a gentleman who gave the name of the senior member of one of the leading firms of American publishers was waiting for me in the visitors’ room. 1 was somewhat annoyed by the inopportune moment of his call, and perhaps I was a trifle brusque in my greeting, when, after keeping him waiting half an hour or so, I strode into the visitors’ room, where sat a man wearing that expression of obsequious deference that is common to a publisher in the presence of an author. “Ah, ‘ Dr.’ Watson,” said this person in a tone that was strangely familiar. ‘ How did you enjoy your walk down Broadway this morning? And what do you think of the Stock Exchange? And how does the city look from the top of a 29-story building ?” 1 staggered and almost fainted. Indeed, 1 was compelled to lean upon the mantel for support, for my visitor was none other than Sherlock Holmes! He had sent up the name of the publisher in order to give me an all the more agreeable surprise. I will spare my readers the sentimental details of the proceedings immediately following this revelation. After I had again and again embraced the friend I had mourned as dead, and had made him repeat for the hundredth time the story of his marvelous rescue by a ship bound for China, whence he had reached New York that day, via San Francisco, I said : “I suppose it was my manager who directed you to me here. And he told you of our stroll about the city this morning, did he ?” LEINEIE THE POWER OF ALCOHOL. “On the contrary,” replied Sherlock Holmes, “1 haven't spoken to another soul, except to give my cabman your address, and the servant here a wrong name, since I arrived in town, just about an hour ago.” “ How on earth then,” I exclaimed, “ did you know that I had visited the Stock Exchange and gone up on the top of a building? But, of course, that is only clever conjecture, since this is the usual route for a stranger in New York on his first day. However, that does not explain how you came by my address !"" “Not exactly conjecture,” said Holmes carelessly. ‘ You were driven to this club from the steamship pier; and, after remaining here for about an hour, you went out with two other men; walked down Broadway to Wall street; spent half an hour in the gallery of the Stock Exchange; walked back to the World building and went up in the lift to the roof; comicbooks.com