Paste
the summary in the notebook.
The
Adventure of the Speckled Band Summary
The case is brought to
Holmes' attention by a distraught young woman named Helen Stoner. Miss Stoner
seeks out Holmes in the early hours of the morning on a fine spring day in
1883.
Helen Stoner recounts for
them the sad story of her life. Her mother was killed eight years ago, left
Helen and her twin sister with a healthy inheritance and a violent stepfather.
The stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, comes from a noble but tragic bloodline.
The Roylott family wealth has been squandered over time by the reckless and
violent male heirs of the Roylott line. Since the death of Helen's mother, Dr.
Roylott has been content to live off his dead wife's income. He indulges his
violent nature frequently with his stepdaughters and with the surrounding
villagers, who all fear the dreaded Roylott. His only friends are a band of
gypsies who frequently visits Roylott's family home at Stoke Moran, as well as
a cheetah and a baboon that are allowed to roam freely over the grounds.
Helen appeals to Holmes to
help her because she fears her stepfather is plotting against her life.
However, she has absolutely no proof, and even her fiancé thinks her fears are
groundless.
Helen fears for her life
because her twin sister, Julia, died mysteriously two years ago at the family
home in Stoke Moran some two weeks before her wedding. Helen's wedding date is
now approaching, and as she relates the story of Julia's death, we see
similarities to Helen's current situation. On the night she died, Julia
mentioned to Helen that for the past several nights, she'd been woken by the
sound of a low whistle in the dead of night. The same night she told Helen
about the whistle, Julia died mysteriously in her locked room. Julia's last
words referred to a "speckled band." Helen believes she died of
fright but cannot imagine what frightened her sister so.
Helen's current agitation
stems from the fact that her stepfather has begun repairs on Helen's bedroom,
which has forced Helen to move into her dead sister's bedroom until the repairs
are completed. Helen insists to Holmes that her room was never in need of
repair at all and believes it's a ploy to move her into Julia's room. Finally,
late last night while Helen was lying in bed, she heard it - the sound of a low
whistle in the dead of night. Helen came straightaway to see Holmes to hire him
in assisting her. She explains to Holmes that she cannot pay him until after
her wedding. She gets control of her inheritance only when she marries; until
then it is in her stepfather's hands.
Holmes puts Helen’s mind at
ease and agrees to meet her at Stoke Moran later that afternoon and Holmes
discusses the case with Watson. Holmes' initial theory is that Roylott has
hired a gypsy friend to break into the bedroom and in some way cause his
stepdaughters' deaths. Just then Roylott bursts through the door. He threatens
Holmes and admits to having followed
Helen there this morning and tells Holmes to stay out of his business.
Holmes goes off to research
his theory that morning; in the process he reviews Helen's mother's will.
Holmes and Watson travel through the English countryside to reach Roylott's
house. During the trip, Holmes tells Watson that the provisions of the will
give Roylott a very good motive for murder indeed. When they arrive at Stokes
Moran, Helen shows them the rooms where she and Dr. Roylott sleep. Holmes exams
the shuttered bars on the windows and immediately realizes his gypsy theory is
wrong; the windows are impassable. Inside Julia's old room, he finds a fake
bell-pull next to the bed attached to a tiny ventilator shaft which leads, not
to the outside air, but straight to Dr. Roylott's bedroom next door. In Dr.
Roylott's bedroom they find a saucer of milk standing on top of a safe and a
tiny dog leash looped into a noose. Holmes has seen enough, but he needs to
prove his theory. He gives Helen some instructions, then he and Watson goes it
out of there before Roylott gets back.
Holmes and Watson keep watch
from an inn across the way that has a clear view of the house. They watch as
Roylott returns, and they are still watching several hours later as Helen gives
the all-clear signal. They get into the house, seen by no one and enter through
the window to Julia's bedroom, which Helen has left open. They get inside
Julia’s room with a gun, a cane, and a candle, but no lamp because Roylott
would see the light glow through the ventilator. Holmes warns Watson not to
make a sound, and the men wait in silence.
Hours later, they see light
through the ventilator shaft and then hear a soft hissing. Holmes lights the
candle and attacks the bell-rope with his cane. They hear a low whistle from
the next room. Watson can only watch helplessly; he has no idea what's going
on. Suddenly, they hear a blood-curdling scream come from Dr. Roylott's room.
Rushing to his room, they find him dead, in his chair, with a speckled bandana
(kerchief) on his head. The head band moves, it hisses at them. Holmes warns
Watson that the speckled band is a swamp adder from India, and that its venom
kills in ten seconds. Holmes slips the noosed dog leash around the snake and
throws it back into the open safe.
The next day, he and Watson
see Helen safely off to her aunt's house to continue her life and her wedding
plans. The coroner's inquiry officially lists Roylott's death as an accident;
he was careless with his tropical pet. Holmes explains, for Watson's benefit,
the scientific method which led him to suspect the murder weapon was a swamp
adder, and he fills in all the details we might have missed about Dr. Roylott's
wicked plan. As usual with a Sherlock Holmes story, the villain is apparent
from the beginning. The pleasure in reading Conan Doyle's work comes from
following Holmes as he unravels (unties) the puzzle. Through Watson's eyes, the
reader is able to get inside the mind of the great Holmes and to learn to think
like a master detective.
I
have taken this from the net a detailed summary for your reference which can
help during examination. No need to take print out of this.
The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Speckled Band Summary
·
Now we go back even
further in time, says Watson, to a case that Holmes investigated while he and
Watson were still bachelor-ing it up together at the 221B Baker Street
apartment.
·
Watson sets the stage:
it's early April 1883, and Holmes wakes Watson at the ungodly hour of 7:15am to
tell him that a young lady has come to Holmes with a case.
·
And indeed, in the
sitting room is a lady of around thirty, dressed in black with a black veil,
who's shaking with fear. She is pale and drawn, and her hair has strands of
premature grey. She's desperate for help, and promises Holmes that, while she
can't pay him anything now, she'll be married soon and have control of her own
income. So she's good for the money, if he'll give her time.
·
Holmes says that it's no
problem. He's in this business for the pleasure of the hunt, though he'll be
happy to let her pay him back for any expenses he works up, at her convenience.
So, he says, let's hear your story.
·
The lady's name is Helen
Stoner, and she's living with her stepdad.
·
This stepdad is the last
living member of a great English family, the Roylotts. The Roylotts once
controlled huge tracts of land, but after generations of spending lots of
money, nothing is left of the estate except an old house, heavily mortgaged.
·
The current (and final)
Roylott, seeing that there's nothing left of his inheritance, goes to India to
make his fortune on his own. Hedoes succeed in making some cash –
but Roylott also manages to get into trouble. He flies into a rage when his
house gets robbed and beats his Indian butler to death, for which he is sent to
prison for a while. Eventually, though, he goes back to England.
·
Roylott was pretty busy
while he was in India: not only does he set up his own medical practice and
beat his butler to death, but he also finds the time to marry Miss Stoner's
mother, a young widow at the time. Miss Stoner also has a twin sister, Julia.
·
Miss Stoner's mother was
left with quite a lot of money – one thousand pounds per year (about U.S.
$132,000 now) – which she left to Roylott upon her death eight years prior. But
her will does allow for some of that money to go to Miss Stoner and to Julia
if/when the girls get married.
·
With the money his wife
has left him, Roylott takes Miss Stoner and Julia away from London and to his
old family home in Stoke Moran. For their part, Miss Stoner and Julia are
psyched to go: they think they'll be happy there.
·
But then – Roylott
changes. He becomes violent and starts frightening away all the neighbors. He
has no friends except for a group of Roma (known kind of negatively throughout
the story as "gipsies") who camp on the lawn. Roylott also keeps a
cheetah and a baboon to roam the grounds.
·
Because of Roylott's
hideous temper, Miss Stoner and Julia can't get any servants to stay at the
house. The work, Miss Stoner says, contributed to Julia's death two years
before.
·
The thing is, before her
death (obviously, since she's not a zombie), Julia had gone to visit her
mother's sister. It's there that she meets a guy who wants to marry her.
·
Roylott doesn't object
openly to the marriage, but exactly two weeks before the date of the wedding,
Julia is killed.
·
That fatal night,
Roylott goes to bed early, but he isn't sleeping yet: the smell of his heavy
Indian tobacco is bothering Julia, whose bedroom is right next to his. So Julia
goes over to Miss Stoner's room, which is on the other side of Julia's room, to
chat about her upcoming wedding.
·
At about 11pm, Julia
heads back to her room to sleep, but before she goes, she asks Miss Stoner if
she has ever heard anyone whistling in the middle of the night.
·
Miss Stoner says no.
·
Julia tells her sister
that, for the past few nights, always at around 3am, she has heard a low
whistle that has awakened her. But she can't hear where it's coming from.
·
Miss Stoner thinks it
must be the people camped out on their lawn.
·
Julia supposes so. She
heads off to sleep.
·
Miss Stoner mentions
that she and Julia have always locked their doors before sleeping because
they're afraid of the cheetah and the baboon.
·
That night, Miss Stoner
can't sleep. She is certain that something bad is going to happen. And sure
enough, in the middle of the night, she hears a woman screaming: it's Julia!
·
Miss Stoner throws open
her door; as she does so, she hears the low whistle Julia described, followed
by a metal clanging sound.
·
Miss Stoner runs to
Julia's room, where the door is curiously unlocked.
·
Miss Stoner sees Julia,
her face terrified, her body swaying, appear in the doorway.
·
Julia starts to
convulse, but is able to say, "Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The
speckled band!" (Speckled. 50).
·
Miss Stoner rushes out
to find her stepfather – he is, after all, a doctor – who's coming out of his
own room while tugging on his dressing gown. He rushes to help Julia, but she's
already unconscious. Julia dies.
·
Holmes is very
interested in this bit about the whistle and the metal clanging sound. He also
asks if Julia was dressed.
·
Miss Stoner says no,
that her sister was in her nightgown, and that she was carrying a burned-out
match and matchbox in her hand.
·
She also tells Holmes
that the coroner tried to find evidence that would prove Roylott was involved
in Julia's death. Everyone in the neighborhood knows he's dangerous, but no one
has been able to find any actual proof that he murdered his stepdaughter.
·
Julia's windows were
locked and barred, and there were no bruises or anything on her body. There's
also no evidence of poison.
·
Miss Stoner thinks Julia
died of fright, and that "the speckled band" might have meant a group
of people – the gypsies, with their spotted handkerchiefs?
·
To get back to Miss
Stoner's story, two years have passed since this terrible event. She has since
gotten engaged to a guy named Percy Armitage.
·
Roylott has not objected
to the marriage, and they couple is supposed to be married in the spring.
·
Two days ago, Miss
Stoner continues, some construction on the outside wall of her bedroom made it
necessary for her to switch rooms. So now she's sleeping in the room her sister
Julia died in (creeeeeepy!).
·
Doubling the creepiness
is this: now that Miss Stoner has moved into her dead sister's room, she, too,
has heard the whistle that Julia heard before she died. Miss Stoner was so
freaked out that she decided to seek help. So she has come to Holmes to ask for
his protection.
·
Holmes says Miss Stoner's
made the right choice, but she still hasn't told him everything: he reaches
over and lifts a frill of lace covering Miss Stoner's wrist. On her skin are
five dark bruises, shaped like fingerprints. Roylott has been abusing her.
·
Holmes asks if he and
Watson can come up to the house at Stoke Moran that day, without her stepdad
knowing.
·
Miss Stoner agrees, and
they decide to meet at Stoke Moran in the early afternoon. Miss Stoner heads
off.
·
Holmes chats with Watson
about the case for a few moments, when suddenly the door swings open.
·
A tall, fierce,
vicious-looking man stands in the doorway.
·
He introduces himself as
Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran. He demands to know what Miss Stoner has
been telling Holmes.
·
Holmes won't answer, and
seems to find Roylott ridiculously funny.
·
Roylott has heard of
Holmes, and understands that Holmes likes to get involved in other people's
affairs. Roylott warns Holmes not to get involved in this one: Roylott's a
tough guy, and he won't be messed with.
·
To prove his overall
toughness, Roylott grabs a poker from the fireplace and bends it. He tosses the
bent poker at Holmes as though to say, "See what a powerful guy I
am!" and then flounces off.
·
Holmes responds, though
Roylott's unfortunately not there to see it, by bending the poker back straight
again.
·
Holmes is most offended
that Roylott seems to have confused Holmes with the official police: he is,
above all, aprivate detective.
·
Before going on their
afternoon journey to Stoke Moran, Holmes visits a public office to see the will
of Miss Stoner's dead mother. It turns out that her estate had originally been
worth about 1,100 pounds (now U.S. $131,000) a year in interest, but its value
has dropped to 750 pounds (U.S. $89,000). Each of the girls, if married, is
supposed to get 250 pounds in income. Which would leave Roylott with only 250
pounds a year of his own (around U.S. $30,000), enough to ruin him financially.
So he's got a great motive for killing off his engaged stepdaughter(s).
·
Holmes and Watson head
to Stoke Moran – Watson is armed, by the way.
·
They meet Miss Stoner as
she's walking across a field towards the house.
·
Holmes tells her that
her stepdad knows she visited Holmes that morning. He tells her to keep her
door locked that night.
·
They reach the house,
and Holmes begins his investigation. Half the house is totally falling down,
but the right wing, where Miss Stoner and Roylott live, is in pretty good
condition. In fact, the house repairs seem unnecessary, and Miss Stoner admits
that she thinks Roylott started the construction to make her move from her own
bedroom to Julia's.
·
It would be totally
impossible to get into Miss Stoner's current room from the outside if the
shutters were closed and barred from the inside. So Holmes is confused.
·
They enter the room, and
there's a lot going on that seems suggestive to Holmes: the room itself is
pretty bare, but there's a beautiful bell-pull, newer than all the other things
in the room, that was installed just a couple of years ago. But Julia never used
it, nor did she ask for it to be put in. As Holmes looks more closely, he finds
that she couldn'thave used it even if she wanted to, because it's
not attached to anything.
·
Something else that's
pretty odd: at the same time as the fake bell-pull was installed, a new
ventilating duct was placed in the wall of the room. But it doesn't go outside,
oh no: it leads from Julia's bedroom to Roylott's, a strange choice if you're
looking to bring fresh air into a room.
·
Holmes also looks into
Roylott's room, which has a safe.
·
Miss Stoner says the
safe must hold his business papers, but Holmes thinks otherwise – he suggests
that an animal is inside, because there's a saucer of milk on top of the safe.
·
He also checks out the
seat of Roylott's chair and then spots a small dog whip hung on a corner of
Roylott's bed, tied in a loop.
·
Holmes seems to have
figured it all out by looking at these clues, but Watson and Miss Stoner are
still lost.
·
Holmes decides that he
and Watson have to spend the night in Miss Stoner's current room. She must go
to bed early, pretending to have a headache, and then sneak quietly into her
former bedroom (despite the repairs) for the evening.
·
Holmes and Watson get a
nearby hotel room, from which they can see Roylott's house.
·
Holmes confesses to Watson
that he feels kind of bad about bringing Watson along on this one because he'll
be in some danger.
·
Watson's all, "No
worries!" (Dr. John Watson laughs in the face of danger.) He also admits
that he has no cluewhat's going on.
·
Holmes throws him a bone:
first, Holmes tells Watson that he knew there was a ventilator between Julia
and Roylott's bedrooms even before they saw the house. How? Because Julia was
bothered by the smell of her stepdad's cigar smoke the night she died.
·
Holmes also points out
that it's pretty weird that the fake bell-pull and the ventilator were both put
it in just around the time that Julia died. What's more, her bed has been
nailed to the floor. So it can't be moved.
·
All of this is evidence,
Watson says, of some "subtle and horrible crime" (Speckled. 218).
·
So, Holmes and Watson
settle in to watch the Stoke Moran house from their local inn until 11pm, when
Miss Stoner lights a lamp in her sister's bedroom window to signal to Holmes
and Watson that she's heading over to her old bedroom.
·
Holmes and Watson sneak
onto the estate. Watson is surprised to see something that looks like a
deformed child running across the grounds. It's the baboon. The cheetah's also
probably around somewhere.
·
Holmes and Watson creep
quietly into Julia's former bedroom, through the window. They lock the shutters
behind them and turn off the light for fear that Roylott will see the light
through the ventilator shaft.
·
They wait, wide awake.
Watson has his pistol ready for action.
·
Finally, around 3am,
they see a brief flash of light. A smell of burning oil and heated metal wafts
in, and Watson realizes that someone in the next room has lit a dark-lantern, a
lamp with a special sliding panel for blocking light.
·
After half an hour,
there is another tiny sound, like a jet of steam from a kettle.
·
Holmes strikes a match
and starts beating at the bell-pull with his cane.
·
Watson can't see what it
is that Holmes is hitting, though he can see that Holmes's
face is filled with disgust and horror.
·
Holmes stops with the
cane, but he's watching the ventilator carefully.
·
Suddenly, they hear a
terrible yell. Holmes tells Watson to bring his gun, and they enter Roylott's
room.
·
Roylott is dead, sitting
in his wooden chair with that small leather dog whip across his chest. Around
his forehead is a weird yellow band with brown spots – a band that moves! It
is, in fact, a snake, an Indian swamp adder (tragically, not a real snake).
·
Holmes grabs the dog
whip from Roylott's body and uses the loop tied at the end as a noose to catch
the snake and put it back in the safe.
·
Holmes and Watson bring
Miss Stoner (who's fairly freaked out) to her aunt at Harrow.
·
The coroner decides that
Roylott's death is the result of an accident while playing with a dangerous
pet.
·
Holmes explains the rest
of the case to Watson: Holmes admits that he started out on completely the
wrong track. He also thought the "speckled band" reference was
probably to the Roma group living on Roylott's land. But Holmes realized that
he was wrong when he saw how impossible it would be to get into the room from
the outside.
·
Once Holmes saw the
ventilator, the bell-pull, and the nailed-down bed, he figured that the
ventilator must be some kind of bridge for something to travel between the two
rooms.
·
The whole snake thing
then seemed obvious, especially given Roylott's history in India.
·
As for the whistle,
Roylott probably trained the snake to respond to a whistle to make it return to
his room before it could be seen by its potential victim, if it didn't bite her
right away.
·
In Roylott's room,
Holmes saw signs that Roylott liked to stand on his chair (to get access to the
ventilator). The safe, the milk, and the whipcord all pointed to the training
and management of this dangerous animal. The clang Miss Stoner heard the night
before was the sound of Roylott quickly closing the door of the safe to shut in
the snake. And the rest is history!
·
Holmes admits that, by
attacking the snake and sending it back to its owner, he's probably responsible
for it striking out at Roylott on the other side of the vent. He also can't say
that he feels too bad about that.
Copy the remaining summary of “The Charge of the
Light Brigade” in the notebook.
The
soldiers struck the enemy gunners with their unsheathed swords (“sabres bare”)
and charged at the enemy army while the rest of the world looked on in wonder.
They rode into the artillery smoke and broke through the enemy line, destroying
their Cossack and Russians who were their opponents. Then they rode back from
the offensive, but they had lost many men so they were
“not the six hundred” any more.
Canons
behind and on both sides of the soldiers now assaulted them with shots and
shells. As the brigade rode “back from the mouth of hell,” soldiers and horses
collapsed; few remained to make the journey back.
The
world marveled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying:
the poem states these noble 600 men remain worthy of honor and tribute today.
They will be remembered forever.
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