"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle

...in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.

“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.”

“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”

“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words.

A prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose, looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered.

The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment of a lady?

If you have not, you are not fitted for the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history of the country. But if you have why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to condescend to accept anything under the three figures?

You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an offer seemed almost too good to be true.

Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey.

After all, if these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity.

We are willing to give £ 30 a quarter, or £ 120 a year, so as to recompense you for any little inconvenience which our fads may cause you.

They are not very exacting, after all. My wife is fond of a particular shade of electric blue and would like you to wear such a dress indoors in the morning.

You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.

There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock.

There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock.

Mr. Rucastle told me in private that the reason why she had left them was that she had an unreasoning aversion to her stepmother.

He was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole they seemed to be a happy couple.

I have thought sometimes that it was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature.

Toller, for that is his name, is a rough, uncouth man, with grizzled hair and whiskers, and a perpetual smell of drink.

I assure you that it has not detracted in the tiniest iota from your appearance.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle expressed a delight at the look of it, which seemed quite exaggerated in its vehemence.

Again I changed my dress, again I sat in the window, and again I laughed very heartily at the funny stories of which my employer had an immense répertoire, and which he told inimitably.

Again I changed my dress, again I sat in the window, and again I laughed very heartily at the funny stories of which my employer had an immense répertoire, and which he told inimitably.

‘Jephro,’ said she, ‘there is an impertinent fellow upon the road there who stares up at Miss Hunter.’

Toller lets him loose every night, and God help the trespasser whom he lays his fangs upon. For goodness’ sake don’t you ever on any pretext set your foot over the threshold at night, for it’s as much as your life is worth.

The warning was no idle one, for two nights later I happened to look out of my bedroom window about two o’clock in the morning.

It was a beautiful moonlight night, and the lawn in front of the house was silvered over and almost as bright as day. I was standing, rapt in the peaceful beauty of the scene, when I was aware that something was moving under the shadow of the copper beeches.

It was a giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging jowl, black muzzle, and huge projecting bones.

That dreadful sentinel sent a chill to my heart which I do not think that any burglar could have done.

One day, however, as I ascended the stair, I met Mr. Rucastle coming out through this door, his keys in his hand, and a look on his face which made him a very different person to the round, jovial man to whom I was accustomed.

A horrible doubt came into my mind as I approached the door lest the dog might be loose, but I remembered that Toller had drunk himself into a state of insensibility that evening, and I knew that he was the only one in the household who had any influence with the savage creature, or who would venture to set him free.

My friend rose now and paced up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, and an expression of the most profound gravity upon his face.

If you could send her into the cellar on some errand, and then turn the key upon her, you would facilitate matters immensely.

Of course there is only one feasible explanation. You have been brought there to personate someone, and the real person is imprisoned in this chamber.

This child’s disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.

We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning man.

The group of trees, with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting sun, were sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been standing smiling on the door-step.

There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen.

“Ah, yes,” he cried, “here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.”

As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that she has met with considerable success.