As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hill-sides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.

The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil.

I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.
All this, however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely practical mind.

I can still remember your complete indifference as to whether the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun.

Let me, therefore, return to the facts concerning Sir Henry Baskerville.
If you have not had any report within the last few days it is because up to to-day there was nothing of importance to relate.
Then a very surprising circumstance occurred, which I shall tell you in due course.