Pomona placed all the souvenirs she had bought on Baker Street on the table, then took out colorful wrapping paper and wrapped them one by one. It was a little early, but she thought they would make nice Christmas presents.
She had bought Flitwick the complete works of Sherlock Holmes. After wrapping them all, she suddenly felt like rereading them, so she waved her wand and let the wrapping paper finish the job on its own, then casually pulled a book from the shelf.
It was a collection of short stories. In 1894, three years after everyone believed Sherlock Holmes had fallen to his death with Professor Moriarty over a waterfall, he returned to Baker Street disguised as a vagrant and solved several cases in succession. One day, he received a commission from a country gentleman named Cupid. His American wife, Elsie, had recently received a series of mysterious messages—a string of chalk drawings resembling dancing little men—and had become deeply uneasy.
Mr. Cupid loved Elsie very much. Even when she told him she had a shameful past, he was still willing to marry her. Later, through a series of investigations, it was discovered that Elsie was the daughter of a Chicago gang leader. She had once been engaged to a man named Abe Slaney, a notorious gangster. Telephones already existed then, and Sherlock Holmes confirmed this by calling the Chicago police.
Yet the most brilliant part of the story was still Holmes's process of deciphering the code. Pomona held the book and sat down on the sofa.
The cipher was not complicated. At least, it did not require a cipher machine to encode or decode it. One only needed to remember which letter each little man represented, like memorizing a new alphabet. There was not even a key to