Chapter 2: McGonagall Receives an Impossible Guest

The lantern arrived ahead of the man carrying it, swinging with the energetic irregularity of someone moving fast down a steep hill in the dark. It was a large lantern, nearly the size of a small bucket, and it cast a warm orange light that illuminated, as it came through the final stand of pine, a figure of extraordinary physical proportion — a man of perhaps seven feet in height, shoulders like a wardrobe, carrying the lantern in one fist as though it were a teacup.

Holmes noted, in rapid sequence: the man's coat was moleskin, badly repaired at the left shoulder with thread of the wrong weight; his boots left impressions in the frost consistent with a bodyweight approaching three hundred pounds; there was soil on his right knee suggesting he had knelt recently in a flowerbed, and something — Holmes catalogued it as feathers, very large, barred brown and tawny — clung to the lower third of his coat. Not a gamekeeper by formal appointment. A man who performed the function of a gamekeeper while simultaneously performing the function of several other roles this institution apparently required. He had been asleep before the summons and had pulled his coat on over what appeared to be flannel nightclothes.

He was also, Holmes observed, decelerating rapidly at the sight of a Victorian gentleman standing composedly at his gate with an unlit pipe.