ever listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of events
than those which have happened in my own family.
You fill me with interest, said Holmes. Pray give us the essential
facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to
those details which seem to me to be most important.
The young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out towards
the blaze.
My name, said he, is John Openshaw, but my own affairs have, as far
as I can understand, little to do with this awful business. It is a
hereditary matter; so in order to give you an idea of the facts, I must
go back to the commencement of the affair.
You must know that my grandfather had two sons my uncle Elias and my
father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry, which he
enlarged at the time of the invention of bicycling. He was a patentee
of the Openshaw unbreakable tire, and his business met with such
success that he was able to sell it and to retire upon a handsome
competence.
My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and became
a planter in Florida, where he was reported to have done very well. At
the time of the war he fought in Jackson s army, and afterwards under
Hood, where he rose to be a colonel. When Lee laid down his arms my
uncle returned to his plantation, where he remained for three or four
years. About 1869 or 1870 he came back to Europe and took a small
estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had made a very considerable fortune
in the States, and his reason for leaving them was his aversion to the
negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in extending the
franchise to them. He was a singular man, fierce and quick-tempered,
very foul-mouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring
disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I doubt if
ever he set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or three fields
round his house, and there he would take his exercise, though very
often for weeks on end he would never leave his room. He drank a great
deal of brandy and smoked very heavily, but he would see no society and
did not want any friends, not even his own brother.
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