Important Words and Their Meanings
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| compliments | greetings and good wishes for the season |
| perspired | sweated |
| lounging | here, sitting in a relaxed way |
| inferred | concluded |
| row | loud noise or uproar |
| hubbub | noise |
| retain | keep something |
| inquirer | a person asking for something or someone |
| deduce | draw conclusions |
| mantelpiece | a structure of wood, marble, or stone above and around |
| foresight | ability to predict what will happen in the future |
| staggered | moved unsteadily |
The Blue Carbuncle Question and Answer
A. Answer these questions.
1. What was Holmes doing when Dr Watson visited him after Christmas?
Answer: When Dr Watson visited after Christmas, Holmes was lying on a sofa examining an old, damaged hat with a lens and forceps. He was studying clues from the hat while newspapers lay beside him, trying to discover the unknown owner’s identity.
2. How did Peterson come to be in possession of a hat and a goose?
Answer: Peterson got the hat and goose after seeing a tall man attacked by rowdies on Christmas morning. During the scuffle, the man dropped his goose and hat and fled when Peterson, a police officer, approached to help.
3. What did Holmes deduce about the hat’s owner? How did he arrive at his conclusions?
Answer: Holmes deduced that the owner was intellectual, middle-aged, once wealthy, now fallen on hard times, careless, sedentary, and neglected by his wife. He concluded this from the hat’s size, age, dust, broken elastic, sweat marks, hair, and lime cream traces.
5. What was Holmes’ first step towards solving the case?
Answer: Holmes’ first step in solving the case was placing an advertisement in evening newspapers asking Mr Henry Baker to collect his lost goose and hat at Baker Street, hoping this would help trace the bird’s origin and connect it to the stolen jewel.
8. Who had actually stolen the diamond and what did he confess to Holmes?
Answer: James Ryder, the head attendant at Hotel Cosmopolitan, had stolen the blue carbuncle. He confessed that he hid the diamond inside a goose belonging to his sister, Mrs Oakshott, and falsely accused the plumber John Horner of theft.
B. Read these lines and answer these questions with reference to the context.
1. When Peterson had left, I asked Holmes, “Do you think that this Henry Baker had anything to do with the theft?”
a. Which ‘theft’ is being referred to here?
Answer: The ‘theft’ referred to here is the stealing of the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle, a valuable blue diamond that had disappeared from the Hotel Cosmopolitan.
b. Who is Henry Baker? Why did Henry Baker come to meet Holmes?
Answer: Henry Baker was the owner of the lost hat and goose found by Peterson. He came to meet Holmes after seeing the advertisement in the newspaper asking him to collect his belongings from Baker Street.
c. What did Holmes deduce from his behaviour?
Answer: Holmes deduced from Henry Baker’s behaviour that he was innocent. Baker accepted the replacement goose without concern and showed no knowledge that the original goose contained the stolen blue carbuncle.
