The opening pages of Chapter Six finds Dr. Watson, young Sir Henry, and Dr. Mortimer traveling through the moors on their way to Baskerville Hall. In my MHO. Conan Doyle does a fine job of leading us to the Baskerville Hall in writing the following paragraph.
The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshly harts-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun.
Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders... To Sir Henry's eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the returning heir of the Baskervilles.
Bruce Brooks gives the reader pause for thought and speculation when he writes the following in his Forward.
"Now, you could say that in terms of this tale of horror and investigation, this little paragraph merely serves the purpose of getting two characters from one place to the next, and is otherwise unimportant. But in The Hound of the Baskervilles no paragraph, no sentence, no word is unimportant. Conan Doyle uses every tool to set us up, to make us feel what he wants us to feel as readers. Try this: go through the paragraph above, and pick out words and phrases that contribute to a sense that we are trapped inside the motion of something as big as the landscape, as unhealthy as rottenness, and as inevitable as the year that wanes. Go ahead—count 'em up"
POST SCRIPT:
In the above paragraph, Bruce Brooks writes it does a fine job of getting two charters from one place to the other. However, I count, not including the driver, three characters in the wagonette, Watson, Mortimer and young Sir Henry. Maybe Mr. Brooks did this purposefully to test our reading observation. But, then again, perhaps I nit pick.
