The right leg would
be found to be bruised in a marvellous manner all about and under
the knee, and particularly on the interior aspect of the knee. So
far we may proceed with our details. Fired by these discoveries,
an investigator might perhaps have pursued his inquiries further-
-to bruises on the shoulders, elbows, and even the finger joints,
of the central figure of our story. He had indeed been bumped and
battered at an extraordinary number of points. But enough of
realistic description is as good as a feast, and we have
exhibited enough for our purpose. Even in literature one must
know where to draw the line.
Now the reader may be inclined to wonder how a respectable young
shopman should have got his legs, and indeed himself generally,
into such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been
sitting with his nether extremities in some complicated
machinery, a threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making
furies. But Sherlock Holmes (now happily dead) would have fancied
nothing of the kind. He would have recognised at once that the
bruises on the internal aspect of the left leg, considered in the
light of the distribution of the other abrasions and contusions,
pointed unmistakably to the violent impact of the Mounting
Beginner upon the bicycling saddle, and that the ruinous state of
the right knee was equally eloquent of the concussions attendant
on that person's hasty, frequently causeless, and invariably ill-
conceived descents.
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