"The Adventure of the Yellow Face", one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the third tale from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in February 1893, and in Harper's Weekly in the United States on 11 February 1893. One of Doyle's sentimental pieces, the story is remarkable in that Holmes' deduction during the course of it proves incorrect. According to Dr. Watson: ...where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded... Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered. Synopsis/plot Sherlock Holmes, bored due to a want of cases, returns home from a walk with Dr. Watson early in spring to find he has missed a visitor but that the caller has left his pipe behind. From it, Holmes deduces that he was disturbed of mind (because he forgot the pipe); that he valued it highly (because he had repaired with silver bands which costs more than the pipe cost, rather than replacing it, when it was broken); that he was muscular, left-handed, had excellent teeth, was careless in his habits and was not needed to practice economy. None of these deductions is particularly germane to the story: they are merely Holmesian logical exercises. When the visitor, Mr. Grant Munro (whose name Holmes observed from his hatband) returns, Holmes and Watson hear the story of Munro's deception by his wife Effie. She had been previously married in America, but her husband and child had died of yellow fever, whereupon she returned to England and met and married Munro. Their marriage had been blissful says Grant Munro until she asked for a hundred pounds and begged him not to ask why. Two months later, Effie Munro was caught conducting secret liaisons with the occupants of a cottage near the Munro house in Norbury. Grant Munro has seen a mysterious yellow-faced person in this cottage. Overcome with jealousy, he breaks in and finds the place empty. However, the room where he saw the mysterious figure is very comfortable and well furnished, with a portrait of his wife on the mantelpiece. Holmes, after sending Munro home with instructions to wire for him if the cottage was reoccupied, confides in Watson his belief that the mysterious figure is Effie Munro's first husband. He postulates