'Orontes' was an actual troopship - we can then estimate how long it took him to drift up to London, to find that the cost of living there exceeded his means, and at length to decide that he would share lodgings with the somewhat strange individual to whom his old friend Stanford had introduced him. When we know that date - and it is possible to find it from the local newspapers, as the S.S. In A Study in Scarlet, we are told how Watson landed on the quay at Portsmouth, still convalescent from his campaign wound(s) and subsequent attack of enteric fever. Let's take an example - the first one in the Canon. ' With such a problem as discovering the date on which a story occurred, we have a situation in which there is a certain amount of data to provide the clay for our bricks.

As he observed: 'You know my methods, Watson. However, for many readers of the Canon, there is always the temptation to try one's hand at reasoning as the Master does. If we believe that the story is the essential thing in other words, we treat the Canon as simply entertainment, then background details are not essential, and we need not trouble ourselves with them. If the story dates are not indicated, why do we require them? The short answer is 'We don't,' but there are other points to consider. As a result, one of the great unsettled questions in Sherlockian scholarship is 'How many times was Watson married, and to whom?' The most common of these is Watson's marriage (about which there is no information whatever in the Canon). Some are partially dated (day or month or year) by reference to other cases or events. Several others are not dated at all in some we know the season, or perhaps the month. Are not the dates of each story indicated in the text? A complete date (day/month/year) is given in roughly one-half of the stories.

The sign of the sherlock holmes