"Holmes," I hissed. "Who on earth is that old goat? And when are you going to tell me what you dragged me down here for?"

"That 'old goat' is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, squire of Lew Trenchard, antiquarian, self-educated expert in half a dozen fields, and author of more books than any other man listed in the British Museum. Hymnist, collector of country music—"

A small light went on in my mind. " 'Onward Christian Soldiers'? 'Widdecombe Fair'?"

"He wrote the one and collected the other. Rural parson," he continued, "novelist, theologian"—Yes, I thought, I had heard of him somewhere, connected with dusty tomes of archaic ideas—"amateur architect, amateur archaeologist, amateur of many things. He is one of the foremost living experts on the history and life of Dartmoor. He is a client with a case. He is also," he added, "a friend."

While we were talking I had followed the candle up the stairway with its requisite portraits of dim and disapproving ancestors and through a small gallery with a magnificent plaster ceiling, but at this final statement I stopped dead. Fortunately, he did not go much farther, but opened a door and stepped into a room. After a moment, I followed, and found him turning up the lights in a nice-sized bedroom with rose-strewn paper on the walls (peeling up slightly at the seams) and a once-good, rose-strewn carpet on the floor. I put the rucksack on a chair that looked as if it had seen worse usage and sat gingerly on the edge of the room's soft, high bed.

"Holmes," I said. "I don't know that I've ever heard you describe anyone other than Watson as a friend."

"No?" He bent to set a match to the careful arrangement of sticks and logs that had been laid in the fireplace. There was a large radiator in the room, but like all the others we had passed, it stood sullen and cold in its corner. "Well, it is true. I do not have many."

"How do you know him?"

"Oh, I've known Baring-Gould for a long time. I used him on the Baskerville case, of course. I needed a local informant into the life of the natives and his was the name that turned up, a man who knew everything and went everywhere. We correspond on occasion, he came to see me in Baker Street two or three times, and once in Sussex."

I couldn't see how this sparse contact qualified the man for friendship, but I didn't press him.

"I shouldn't imagine he 'goes everywhere' now."

"No. Time is catching up with him."

"How old is he?"

"Nearly ninety, I believe. Five years ago you'd have thought him a hearty seventy. Now there are days when he does not get out of bed."

I studied him closely, hearing a trace of sorrow beneath his matter-of-fact words. Totally unexpected and, having met the object of this affection, quite inexplicable.

"You said he had a case for us?"