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whence he dispatched a long telegram. He then hailed a cab,
and ordered the driver to take us to the address given us by
Lestrade.

"There is nothing like first hand evidence," he remarked;
"as a matter of fact, my mind is entirely made up upon the case,
but still we may as well learn all that is to be learned."

"You amaze me, Holmes," said I. "Surely you are not as sure
as you pretend to be of all those particulars which you gave."

"There's no room for a mistake," he answered. "The very
first thing which I observed on arriving there was that a cab
had made two ruts with its wheels close to the curb. Now, up
to last night, we have had no rain for a week, so that those
wheels which left such a deep impression must have been there
during the night. There were the marks of the horse's hoofs,
too, the outline of one of which was far more clearly cut
than that of the other three, showing that that was a new
shoe. Since the cab was there after the rain began, and was
not there at any time during the morning -- I have Gregson's
word for that -- it follows that it must have been there
during the night, and, therefore, that it brought those two
individuals to the house."

"That seems simple enough," said I; "but how about the other
man's height?"

"Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten,
can be told from the length of his stride. It is a simple
calculation enough, though there is no use my boring you with
figures. I had this fellow's stride both on the clay outside
and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my
calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads
him to write about the level of his own eyes. Now that writing
was just over six feet from the ground. It was child's play."

"And his age?" I asked.

"Well, if a man can stride four and a-half feet without the
smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow.
That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he
had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone
round, and Square-toes had hopped over. There is no mystery
about it at all. I am simply applying to ordinary life a few
of those precepts of observation and deduction which I
advocated in that article. Is there anything else that
puzzles you?"

"The finger nails and the Trichinopoly," I suggested.

"The writing on the wall was done with a man's forefinger
dipped in blood. My glass allowed me to observe that the
plaster was slightly scratched in doing it, which would not
have been the case if the man's nail had been trimmed.
I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark
in colour and flakey -- such an ash as is only made by a
Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes --
in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject.
I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of
any known brand, either of cigar or of tobacco.

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