The Mercury Theater on the air. The Columbia Broadcasting System

Take pleasure in bringing you the 12th in a series of weekly broadcasts

featuring Austin Wells and the Mercury Theater on the air. Tonight, Broadway's and radio's most celebrated theatrical producing company

brings to life the best-loved character in detective fiction,

the immortal Sherlock Holmes.

The play is Orson Wales' own adaptation for radio of William Gillette's

enduring melodrama based on the famous stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Before the performance begins, here is the director of the Mercury Theater, the star and producer of these unique broadcasts, Orson Well.

Good evening.

Well, tonight it's back to Baker Street, back to that unlikely

London of the 19th century where high adventure awaits all who would seek it in a

handsome cab or under a gas lamp in an

in an invern escape. But tonight we paid tribute to the most wonderful

member of that most wonderful world, a gentleman who never lived and who will never die.

There are only a few of them, these permanent profiles,

everlasting silhouettes on the edge of the world.

There is first the little hunchback with a slapstick whose hook nose is shaped like his cap.

There is now and always will be the penguin-footed hobo in the derby and the baggy pants,

and the small boy with a wooden head, and the long rusty night on horseback, and the fat night who could only procure a charge on foot.

There is also the tall gentleman with a hawk's face and the underslung pipe,

and the fore-sling pipe, the foreign aft cap.

We'd know them anywhere and call them easily by name.

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