The Brown Hand

A guest at Rodenhurst is shown to his room and finds it is no bedroom: a bare laboratory on the edge of Salisbury Plain, a settee for a bed, a long line of specimen jars in the moonlight. His host will not say what he is meant to see there.

Sir Dominick Holden's nerve was once a byword in India. Years ago at Peshawur he amputated a hillman's hand and claimed it, half in jest, as his fee; the man agreed on one condition, that he would want it back when he was dead. Then a fire in Bombay took the collection. A ghost story settled not by exorcism but by a physician's practical reasoning, from the years when its author had left Sherlock Holmes dead at the Reichenbach.