“He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. But I did – some little distance off, but fresh and clear.”

“Footprints?”

“Footprints.”

“A man’s or a woman’s?”

Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

—  from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”