The Wrong Box

In a sandy hollow of the New Forest, Morris Finsbury digs a grave with his pocket-knife. The fur coat, the hygienic flannel, the health boots — everything identifies the dead man as Uncle Joseph, one of two lives left in a tontine worth a hundred thousand pounds, and Morris means to keep him alive on paper as long as it takes. A few hundred yards deeper in the wood, Uncle Joseph is asleep.

The trouble then travels as freight: a water-butt nailed shut and labelled specimens, a colossal marble Hercules set down on a Bloomsbury doorstep, a bored magistrate amusing himself with every label in a luggage van. The comedy runs on the refusal of respectable men to say what has arrived — a pattern English farce has been working ever since.