文档介绍：The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
The Adventure of the
Cardboard Box
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
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 y 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 panion, 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 filaments stretching out and running through
them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime.
Appreciation of nature found no place among his ma