Some time ago, while I was collecting and photographing images of an old theatre (whose identity I cannot reveal, but not unlike the Mabel Tainter Memorial, an opulent turn-of-the-century theatre, resplendent with gilt carvings in a Moroccan motif), I chanced upon some curious writings.

On the first floor of this Victorian artifact, there is a vault containing original records of the theatre, along with old play scripts, presumably discarded by touring theatre companies or forgotten during the frenetic schedule of nightly load-ins and load-outs that were inherently chaotic. Fiscal necessity, however, could not dictate otherwise, and these troupes of actors continued well into the 1920's.

As I was searching for old stage properties in the vault, I came across several unbound sheets of handwritten narrative. I was about to stuff this material back into a neglected corner from whence it came, when I came across a title sheet, bearing the name of the author, one Dr. John H. Watson. Being a devotee of the good doctor's tales of his friend, Sherlock Holmes, I was elated beyond description and immediately set to the task of making sense of what I held.

This proved no easy task, however. The sheets themselves had not aged well in the damp vault; some of the material was in pencil and had become almost illegible. Other pages were torn, and I was forced to supplement in my own hand what I thought the missing fragments once held.

The results of my efforts are contained below. I do not believe for one moment that these are part of the long-lost, unpublished manuscripts Dr. Watson had placed in the bank of Cox and Company at Charing Cross. These writings are but forgeries. However, several touring groups and speakers visited the theatre during its first few decades. Skovgaard, "The Danish Violinist," performed on his 1909-10 American Tour and Capt. Roald Amundsen presented his lecture, "Conquest of the Northwest Passage", although the year is not known. It may be possible, therefore, that the torn, dirty pages in my hand may have originated in Europe.