A Study in Scarlet — page 54: what you’re looking at

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

46, A STUDY IN SCARLED. Gregson’s word for that—it follows that it must have been there during the night, and, therefore, that it brought those two individuals to the house.”’ “That seems simple enough,” said I; “ but how about the other man’s heightP ” “Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. It is a stmple calculation enough, though there is no use my boring you with figures. I had this fellow’s stride, both on tha clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a wey of checking my calculation. When a man wmites on a wall, his instinct leads him to write about the level of his own eyes. Now, that writing was: just over Six feet from the ground. It was child’s play.” “And his age?” I asked. ‘Well, if a man can stride four and a half feet with. out the smallest effort, he can’t be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden-walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round and Square-toes had hopped over. There 1s no mystery about it at all. I am simply applying to ordinary life a few of those precepts of observation and deduction which I advo- cated in that article. Is there anything else that puzzles your” “The finger-nails and the Trichinopoly,” I suggested. “The writing on the wall was done with a man’s fore- finger dipped in blood. My glass allowed me to observe that the plaster was slightly scratched in doing it, which would not have been the case if the man’s nail had been trimmed. I gathered up some scattered ash from the (C(O) an (E JOO “s) (E(0)