There is the scratchy, hasty handwriting of the living person. Holmes was too impatient even to lift his pen from the paper, and the nib of his pen trailed a nearly continuous line across the page that one stared at for some time before it suddenly resolved into words. When they speak of the excitement of discovery I suppose they are talking partly about this sensation of physically visiting the past. All such documents are unexpected and revealing, because they carry something, not only of their authors, but of their time. A black border-there has been a death.
Watermarks give a place and sometimes a date that is otherwise lost.
Discolored creases show that a letter has been folded and carried in a pocket book, perhaps for years. The idiosyncrasies of paper making and handwriting give every document a faint perfume of individuality. Holmes destroyed nearly all the letters he received from Lady Castletown during the time of their romantic liaison, but he kept one. It was written on a small sheet of heavy stock, hardly more than a card, folded over once. With the help of Dr. Peter E Stevens, curator of the Harvard Herbaria, I was able to identify the leaves, and so fill in a detail, a slender narrative thread in Holmes's life .