A Study in Scarlet (Serial Edition Cover) — page 167: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

4 STUDY IN SCARLET. 159 eut he was so far gone that I knew the game was in my own hands. “Don’t imagine that I intended to kill him in cold - blood. It would only have been rigid justice if I had done so, but I could not bring myself to doit. I had long determined that he should have a show for his life if he chose to take advantage of it. Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wan- dering life, I was once a janitor and sweeper-out of the laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisons, and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain meant instant death. I spotted the bottle in which this preparation was kept, and when they were all gone I helped myself to a little of it. I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into small, soluble pills, and each pill I put ina box with a similar pill made without poison. I deter- mined at the time that, when I had my chance, my gentlemen should each have a draw out of one of these boxes, while I eat the pill that remained. It would be quite as deadly, and a good deal less noisy than firing across a handkerchief. From that day I had always my pill-boxes about with me, and the time had now come when I was to use them. (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)()