Conan Doyle imagined Sherlock Holmes as a man with a thin hawk-like nose, piercing eyes, and so excessively lean that he seemed even taller than his actual six feet. Thus the author described him in the first Holmes story; A Study in Scarlet. Later, Doyle emphasized his idea that Holmes had a "razor-like face; a great hawk's-bill of a nose; two small eyes set close together" and that he was powerful but ugly. His first important illustrator, Sidney Paget, made a Holmes who was tall, but not extremely tall, and who was far from "ugly". Dr. Doyle thought that this was because Paget had used his brother Walter as a model. He believed that the more comely detective was perhaps fortunately drawn to please the ladies. The writer of the sketch of Paget in the Dictionary of National Biography, however, denies that the artist used his brother or anyone else as a model. He leaves you to suppose that Paget drew Holmes from his own fancy, based on Doyle's description as given in the stories comprised in the Adventures. One or two artists preceded Paget. Sherlock Holmes appeared for the first time in print in 1887, when A Study in Scarlet was published in that queer-looking periodical, Beeton's Christmas Annual. Despite many excellencies, and one surprise never bettered in any of the tales, this novel attracted little notice. For the initial appearance of a detective whose exploits were to be recorded for nearly forty years, a veteran illustrator of that day, D. H. Friston. was called upon. This first picture of Holmes would distress the devotees. Friston's Sherlock is neither handsome nor intellectual; he wears undertaker's side-whiskers, an ulster with a cape, and a hat like nothing on sea or land- a sort of bastard child of a bowler out of a sombrero. With a magnifying glass as big as a sunflower, he is examining the word RACHE written in blood upon the wall. About him, in grotesque attitudes, stand Watson with a walrus's moustache and the Scotland Yardcrs, Gregson and Lestrade. Mr. Friston seems to have thought that the scene was macabre, and that the characters should look like gargoyles. In the second edition of the story, in book form, there are said to be six illustrations by the novelist's father, Charles Doyle. They should be interesting; Conan Doyle thought his father the greatest and most original of a family of artists. The next Holmes story, another short novel. TheSign of the Four, appeared in Lippincott's Magazine, February,1 890. There is one illustration, a scene in India, in which Holmes does not appear. Ten short stories which carried Holmes's fame around the world, the Adventures, began in the Strand Magazine, July, 1891. For these the already mentioned Sidney Edward Paget, a young illustrator of about thirty, began to draw the Holmes whose features became familiar throughout the British Empire and to some early enthusiasts in the United States. His Holmes had a long nose, high forehead, rather bald temples, and, when at home in Baker Street, usually wore a frock coat. One of the actors who impersonated Holmes in our own time Arthur Wontner, in the screen play, Sherlock Holmes's Fatal Hour~ closely resembled the detective of Paget's pictures. There is an impression that Mr. William Gillette, in his play, first put Holmes in a deer-stalker's cap with visors fore and aft. In one of the early Strand stories, however. The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Dr. Doyle says that Holmes wore a "close-fitting cloth cap", and Paget shows him with a fore-and-after. Watson, even in the country, sticks to his bowler. Mr. Gillette played Holmes in one of these caps, on one evening in London when he was headed for the Stepney gas chamber and rough work. American editors, in 1893, began to be interested in Holmes, and the second series, the Memoirs, ran in Harper's Weekly, in addition to their English publication in the Strand. The American artist, Mr. W.H. Hyde, adorned the stories in Harper's with some striking pictures, but preferred to draw the actors in the criminal events rather than Holmes and Watson. The detective seldom appears, and when he does he is Mr. Hyde's own conception. One recognizes with difficulty, in this youth of the nineties with his short, light overcoat, either the cocaine addict of Baker Street or the expert boxer who twice knocked down Joseph Harrison, the thief of the Naval Treaty. The Memoirs closed with The Final Problem and the "death" of Sherlock Holmes, who went over the cliffs of the Reichenbach, along with his enemy. Professor Moriarty. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1901 , the Strand began publication of the serial. The Houndof the Baskervilles, with Mr. Paget again illustrating the text. Dr. Doyle wisely made no reference to the fact that for six or seven years we had supposed Holmes to be lying on the Alpine mountains cold, but went on with his hero as if nothing had happened. The novel ran in both the English and American editions of the Strand the American always one instalment behind the English. This caused one reader, who began the serial in London and carried on in this country, the agonizing experience of waiting two months for the next instalment, after perusing the blood-curdling words: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"