In the year 1878 I was a teacher and chaplain to the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, an establishment of religious women who care for poor children at Charleston, South Carolina. It was a remarkable affair in relation to one of the nuns there that led me to seek out the assistance of a former acquaintance of mine, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

The train of events was so dark and bizarre, even threatening to both the sister and myself, that I was utterly at a loss as to how to proceed. A knowledge of the political situation in the American South at the time should help the reader to understand why I felt I could not confide in the authorities at Charleston. I went about my duties well enough, but found myself helplessly pacing my room at night and then falling asleep at odd hours, suddenly waking from a daylight nightmare to the sight of my students staring in amusement at me.

In desperation — and feeling an unfamiliar sense of fear — I went into retreat for a week to pray and contemplate what to do. One night, as I completed my spiritual exercises before retiring, a slight flicker of hope came to me. I remembered how Holmes, my former schoolmate, was able to solve even the most intractable puzzles that were presented to him. It occurred to me that I might seek his advice.

Of course, since then the name of Sherlock Holmes has become world famous due to his extraordinary adventures chronicled by his friend John Watson. For years I have been tempted to bring my own singular adventure with Holmes to the attention of the world, but the demands of my vocation have forced decades of delay. Now that I am slipping into retirement and have more leisure for writing, I imagine the reading public might benefit from this tale of the great detective and his very first collaborator — for I was Watson before Watson was Watson.

As a schoolboy at Stonyhurst College, I knew Sherlock Holmes only a little, but all the boys were aware of his prodigious powers of observation. He astonished us more than once. I recall an instance when he exonerated one of my school fellows who was accused of pilfering. Personal things — cricket bats, leather schoolbags, watches — were disappearing overnight, and Holmes deduced that the college porter was the thief. His deduction rested on a mere trifle. The porter had an ireful watchdog that never slept and made us miserable with its barking — oddly, Holmes pointed out, the dog had made no sound during the time the thefts must have occurred. A boy out of bed would have sent the dog into a frenzy, but its own master would have occasioned no qualms in the dog. Impressed at Holmes's observations, the rector faced down the porter and the wrong was righted.

Still, my memories of the ingenious Holmes were somewhat troubled. He was in and out of school, for his family wandered about Europe a good deal. He was not popular. When the boy accused of theft tried to thank him for his help, Holmes turned his back and walked away. Most of us, myself included to my shame, used to make fun of the silent, shy, skinny Holmes, and we thought it a piquant thing to chevvy him about the schoolyard. Because he declined to play cricket with us, we considered him a bit of an auntie, which perhaps explains why he excelled at the more defensive arts of fencing and boxing. In these, no one challenged him: We sensed even then that he was all by himself in a battle with the world.

Blessed with the frame of a boxer myself, I sparred with him a few times. Although I had the shoulders, I lacked the agility of body or mind that Holmes enjoyed. He always out-fought me — and out-thought me!

Even so, Holmes was an indifferent student except in chemistry, where he showed uncommon zeal. In other courses, he paid little attention to the lectures and occasioned some mirth more than once when asked a question:

"Mr. Holmes, be so kind as to explain the concept of a free press?"

"Yes, sir, that would be when the porter irons my trousers for me."

I, on the other hand, was an exceptional student, particularly in theology, languages, and history. (That is why the brothers recruited me early on to join them.) However, I was hopeless at chemistry, so in our seventh year I was thrown into a room with Holmes, who was charged with tutoring me. I didn't relish the idea. Holmes strewed our room with clothes and yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and on rainy afternoons when we were expected to study he would rasp idly at his violin or slip away heaven knew where to smoke a pipe. Except for our chemistry sessions, he was largely oblivious to me and I to him. In fact, we were nearly opposites. My love of good company and good food (I always joked that luncheon and tea were my favorite "courses" at school) made me the reverse of Sherlock Holmes, to whom a good dinner and good company meant nothing.

However, I was drawn to his perverse chemistry experiments. He would coldly kill small animals — mice and rats he had captured — with concoctions of monkshood and ground hemlock kept in phials and scattered at random about our room. From Holmes I came to respect the berries of a bizarre plant called the "cuckoo pint," with which he stunned and paralyzed a number of mice. He would lead me through the forest in search of these plants, and it disturbed me to find them breeding like shadows amongst the innocent spring flowers.

"Here," he would point with his gloved finger, "and here. There is death in these woods."

Of course, I knew of his mania for tobacco, and his furtive smoking didn't bother me — I rather liked the aroma of a good pipe myself — but then one night I found him in the laboratory vigorously chewing tobacco, which was of course strictly forbidden in school. He uncovered a cupful of maggots he had collected from a dead rat in the garden and expectorated into it. The worms thrashed about and were still. It was a revolting experiment that carried its own peculiar fascination.

Another time he put a brick in a pot, filled it with dried tobacco and water up to the brick, and set a teacup on top of the brick. He then covered the pot, heated it over the gas burner, and whispered, "Fetch some ice from the larder." I ran to the kitchen and brought back a bucket of ice, which he placed on top of the pot.

"Quick! Uncover the pot!" I seized the lid. Holmes carefully removed the cup and poured a steaming, light-brown liquid from it into a glass beaker. We repeated this maneuver several times until Holmes was satisfied; he knelt before the beaker and gazed at it for a long time before he spoke.

"A distillation of nicotine," he breathed. "An evil mystery. The essence of death, as lethal as cyanide, and yet I cannot live without it." Hungrily inhaling the remaining steam from the pot, he closed his eyes and went into a reverie from which I knew he would not emerge that night.

In the end, I did well at my chemistry levels.

Our acquaintance faded naturally as I went to seminary and Holmes to Oxford. Upon my ordination, I was posted across the water to the diocese of Charleston and lost track of him. I heard from some old boys that Holmes had left his studies to become a kind of "mender" of delicate problems for the aristocracy; and now, a mender was precisely what I needed. If anyone had a delicate problem, I did, and I could hardly wait until the morning to telegraph to England and inform him of the particulars.

Since I had no idea of Holmes's address, I wired...