He was impossible not to notice, panting and drooling inches from my face. His warm brown eyes, his lolling tongue, his sharp canine teeth. I yield to no man in my love for our canine companions; but to be kissed by a dog when a more desirable companion for such experimentation was near at hand was too much for me to bear. Pushing Toby away from my immediate vicinity, and vowing to ask Holmes later about the phosphorous coating the dumb chum, I rose and gazed in my most lovelorn manner toward where the ravishing woman had stood. She had disappeared.

Even the sight of Holmes brought me no balm. On the contrary, his dishevelled appearance greatly alarmed me.

"Holmes! Your dishevelled appearance greatly alarms me. Look at you."

"I'd like to, but I don't have a mirror at hand." A cheval mirror immediately appeared. Holmes straightened his collar and preened himself. "There. That's better."

"But what happened to you, Holmes? I'm all agog."

"You look it," he replied suavely. "Close your mouth. The game is afoot. We must head for the kitchen and arm ourselves."

We entered Colonel Motherspaw's stately home through the service entrance. In one corner of the butler's pantry, a tall thin man was trying to unlock the safe while his gangly companion experimented with a can of phosphorus paste. Holmes passed by them without seeming to notice their behaviour. He peeked inside the kitchen. I looked over his shoulder. At the table in the center of the room, a tall, well made black man was repairing a coffee pot, while a woman stood swaying to and fro, cracking eggs upon the chintz tablecloth with a French cavalry sabre, whilst muttering strange oaths about "uprooting the family trees' of people who have neither regard for "chronological order' nor take heed of signs requesting them to refrain from "reshelving' materials, and of casting those same persons into the lake with their ancestral timber. She spoke forcefully and well, considering the run-on sentence structure she employed. Her Negro companion worked quietly on, seemingly unperturbed by her utterances.

With a look both of pity and terror, my friend hastily backed out of the kitchen, motioning me to do the same.

"What is the matter, Holmes?" I cried out, after I had, with tremendous strength of will, ceased caroming from wall to ceiling to floor down the narrow servant's passageway. "Why dost thou shake thy head and look so affrighted yet so compassionate?"

"Did you not see her, worn with the toil caused by others' heedlessness? Did you not observe her wild eyes, her disordered clothing, her unkempt hair? Her boots of odd colour and condition?" Holmes heaved a sigh. "T'is a mad world we live in, friend Watson. A mad, mad world."

["Watson." It was Greenhough Smith again, with that patient exasperation I so hate in him. "Shakespeare can get away with it. Dickens can get away with it. You can't."

"You let Conan Doyle "get away' with it," I replied, nettled, prepared to defend my high-flown language with my very pen – or pencil, or typewriter, or even whatever the infernal machine is called that was used to write the words you are now reading.

"Doyle's an eccentric. He believes in fairies and thinks he's another Sir Walter Scott. But he pays the bills. We have to humour him. Since you "killed' Holmes and refuse to relent to my demands to resurrect him, Doyle's Gerard and his other romances are all that's keeping us from insolvency."

"Doyle never would have got his foot through your door had it not been for me," I grumbled.

"True enough," Greenhough Smith admitted with a shrug. "But he's inside now and he's a gold mine. So stop mingeing."

I drew myself up to my full height – not easy to accomplish while seated. More difficult still since I can't draw a line. Mingeing indeed! The very idea! I thrust out my square-jawed, smooth shaven {thanks to Gillette's patented safety razor blades} chin. "Oh, all right." I replied. Then I briefly but bravely extended my tongue at him.]

"I had noticed that she was wearing an old brown boot and a new black one." I replied to Holmes.

"Ah, you are improving, Watson. You did notice the boots."

I would have bounced about the walls again, had not Holmes caught me by the sleeve. "Was she molested, Holmes?"

Holmes heaved another sigh, sending up a cloud of dust that choked me and obscured him from my sight for several minutes. After we brushed off the dust of centuries that had resettled on and around us, he pulled the snake twined around the bell rope. The serpent immediately slithered off to summon the butler Williams.

"I praised you too soon. No, Watson. Have you forgotten the Baskerville case so soon? Upon the underside of this woman's brown boot were imprinted the words, Meyers, Toronto."

"So?"
"And her words. Did they not strike you as odd?"
"Her entire being struck me as odd,Holmes. Cracking eggs upon the tablecloth."

Holmes raised a long, thin forefinger."There you have it, Watson." He sighed again. Again the dust of centuries rose and again it fell upon us as we hacked and coughed it out of our throats. "But I forgot. You were not with me in London, when that frenzied horde of Bootmakers from Toronto ripped my best Inverness cape from my back and my deerstalker from my head. I should have taken you with us. It is in the hour of action that I need you most, and I was never so active in my life as when I sprinted along the Embankment, those crazed Canadians baying at my heels like Sir Henry's Hound from Hell. I regret to say that Colonel Motherspaw was of no assistance whatsoever. He kept bouncing off the lampposts like a ping pong ball.

"The pallor and dishevelled appearance of that crazed soul in the kitchen disclosed to me at once that she worked in a library. Only someone who has had to fetch and shelve innumerable volumes from confined places would look so wild eyed, yet so fatigued. She is not a librarian. We know this by her worn attire and her rambling diatribe against people who reshelve when told not to do so. A library's patrons invariably misshelve books. I have done so myself."

"Naturally, Holmes. It is the common practice to do so."

"A librarian sits serene as a mandarin behind her desk, answering questions with the wisdom expected of her. Her minion must fetch and shelve the tomes. The poor soul is therefore run off her feet and both her boots and her temper show it.

"But why is she cracking eggs upon the tablecloth, Holmes?" "Watson. The pattern on the tablecloth gives you the answer. Despite her lamentable prose style, this woman is so desperate for recognition that she takes every opportunity she can to break into print."

We heard a shout from outside, and then a shrill scream. We ran to the door. Locked.

"Stand back, Holmes," I cried, bracing myself to strike the door with the flat of my foot.

"No need, Watson. I have the key in this Gladstone bag." Holmes pulled out from the bag that had materialised between his legs a large, damp bath sponge, a beryl coronet, Mrs Beryl Stapleton, (who placed the coronet upon her head and went to comfort the unfortunate in the kitchen), four cloven hoofed horseshoes, six Napoleons, twelve dancing stick figures and a large, brass key shaped object labelled "Magic Door Key. Use at your own risk."

Holmes turned the key in the lock. He cautiously opened the door. We crept outside and tiptoed to the gate.

Motherspaw stood in the lane, wringing his hands.

"My daughter. My poor daughter," he moaned, pointing to the marks in the road.
They were the footprints of a gigantic moose.