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hardness and redness would have been discovered on the upper aspect of
the calf, and above the knee and on the inner side, an extraordinary
expanse of bruised surface, a kind of closely stippled shading of
contused points. 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
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