trouble, which a private pen & bottle would not. He declared that if
we were to examine the waste-paper baskets of the hotels around Charing
Cross until we found the mutilated "Times" leader, we could lay our hands
straight upon our man. Holmes examined the note, close to his face, and
then asked Sir Henry if anything else remarkable had happened to him since
he had been in London, or if he had been followed.
Sir Henry complained about being in the thick of a "dime novel" and wanted
to know what the mystery was, and then recollected that he had lost one of
his boots, which Mortimer said was an unimportant point. Holmes wanted to
know more. Sir Henry had bought a new pair of brown boots last night in the
Strand and had put them outside his door to be varnished, but there was only
one there this morning and the boot boy knew nothing about it. He said he
had paid six dollars for the boots, because he thought that he ought
