A surprising passage in The Adventure of the Dancing Men:
[Sherlock] Holmes hunted about among the grass and leaves like a retriever after a wounded bird. Then, with a cry of satisfaction, he bent forward and picked up a little brazen cylinder.
“I thought so,” said he; “the revolver had an ejector, and here is the third cartridge. . . .”
Were ejecting revolvers ever common?
Or perhaps in England “revolver” was used for any handgun? In the Granada Television production of “The Greek Interpreter”, Mycroft calls a single-shot pistol a “revolver”.
Had I not recently got rid of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I could see whether it made any comment on this.