Project Gutenberg's The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Title: The Adventure of the Cardboard Box

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Posting Date: October 23, 2008 [EBook #2344]
Release Date: October, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Adventure of the Cardboard Box

By

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental
qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as
possible, to select those which presented the minimum of
sensationalism, while offering a fair field for his talents. It is,
however, unfortunately impossible entirely to separate the sensational
from the criminal, and a chronicler is left in the dilemma that he must
either sacrifice details which are essential to his statement and so
give a false impression of the problem, or he must use matter which
chance, and not choice, has provided him with. With this short preface
I shall turn to my notes of what proved to be a strange, though a
peculiarly terrible, chain of events.

It was a blazing hot day in August. Baker Street was like an oven, and
the glare of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of the house across
the road was painful to the eye. It was hard to believe that these
were the same walls which loomed so gloomily through the fogs of
winter. Our blinds were half-drawn, and Holmes lay curled upon the
sofa, reading and re-reading a letter which he had received by the
morning post. For myself, my term of service in India had trained me
to stand heat better than cold, and a thermometer at ninety was no
hardship. But the morning paper was uninteresting. Parliament had
risen. Everybody was out of town, and I yearned for the glades of the
New Forest or the shingle of Southsea. A depleted bank account had
caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the
country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He
loved to lie in the very center of five millions of people, with his
fi