It was late in an unseasonably cool morning of June, 1903, when I dropped in upon my friend Sherlock Holmes, in our old rooms in Baker Street. I had spent the night in a weary deathwatch at the bedside of a patient who was also an old friend of mine and my wife's. He had been riddled through with cancer. But even the knowledge that he had welcomed death as a release from the lingering agony that even the strongest doses of morphia I dared give him no longer had the power to mitigate, did nothing to decrease the intense depression I felt about his passing. It had been a helpless, hopeless case throughout, and the grey and miserable drizzle that fell that morning seemed to echo and amplify my mood. My meditations upon mortality had reached a particularly grotesque stage when my cab turned down Baker Street from Marylebone Road on its way to my own lodgings in Queen Anne Street, and it was partly to shake them off, and partly to put off a little longer the moment when I must pain Alicia with my unpleasant news, that I yielded to impulse as I passed the old familiar facade to stop up and see my friend.

Billy the page passed me through to find Holmes seated at the remains of a sparse breakfast, smoking his first pipe of the day (composed of the dottles of yesterday's) and studying one of several newspapers scattered about in the usual untidiness. He glanced up at me keenly.

"Fetch some fresh coffee, Billy," were the first words out of his mouth. "Sit down, old man. You look exhausted."

I nodded and sank gratefully into the comfort of the old chair. Holmes maintained an undemanding silence until I had finished my first cup of coffee. We spoke then for a while of old Hastings, whom Holmes had known slightly.

"Have you anything on hand?" I inquired at length, to turn the conversation to some more cheerful topic. I nodded at the paper folded open beside his plate.