The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

A battered felt hat, cracked and dust-stained, sits on the back of a chair in Baker Street on the second morning after Christmas, and from it Sherlock Holmes reads a stranger's whole life: a man once well-to-do and now fallen on evil days, sedentary, gone to drink, his house no longer lit by gas, and his wife no longer in love with him. That last deduction is the tenderest thing in the story, and Holmes lays it down without a trace of cruelty.