- Watson meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time, in a college medical lab as the latter is squeeing over, apparently, inventing luminol.
- The list Watson makes entitled "Sherlock Holmes: His Limits".
- Watson finds out that Holmes doesn't know that the earth travels around the sun. Holmes proceeds to act patronizing and give him the memorable "brain attic" speech. The response is classic Watson:
- Watson summarizing what the newspapers had to say about the murders: each and every one of them blames the government for it (the Daily Mail even recommends keeping a closer watch on foreigners, nothing has changed in over a hundred years).
- Coupled with Hilarious in Hindsight: When he's about to introduce Watson to Sherlock for the first time, Watson's college chum remarks flippantly that he can imagine Holmes giving a friend a mild dose of poison just to see the effects firsthand - "And, to do him justice, I think he would take the same dose himself." Many, many adventures later, in the Adventure of the Devil's Foot, he is proven correct on both counts.
- The constable who found the body is in bed and not especially keen to speak to Holmes."I made my report at the office," he said.Holmes took a half-sovereign from his pocket and played with it pensively. "We thought that we should like to hear it all from your own lips," he said."I shall be most happy to tell you anything I can," the constable answered with his eyes upon the little golden disk.
- After hearing the constable's account, Holmes and Watson head home for lunch. Holmes, quite intensely discussing the case, switches abruptly to talking about music."There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay."Leaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I meditated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind.
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