The Adventure of the Devils Foot | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Brannan of Woodbridge, Virginia.

The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting
recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock
Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to
publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent,
and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual
exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general
chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend
and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay
very few of my records before the public. My participation in some if his adventures was
always a privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me.
It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegram from Homes last
Tuesday--he has never been known to write where a telegram would serve--in the
following terms:
Why not tell them of the Cornish horror--strangest case I have handled.
I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the matter fresh to his mind,
or what freak had caused him to desire that I should recount it; but I hasten, before
another cancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact
details of the case and to lay the narrative before my readers.
It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's iron constitution showed some
symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind,
aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr.
Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some day
recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent lay aside all his cases and
surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. The state
of his health was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mental
detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being permanently
disqualified from work, to give himself a complete change of scene and air. Thus it was

that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near
Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of