The Wrong Box

by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
PREFACE

'Nothing like a little judicious levity,' says Michael Finsbury
in the text: nor can any better excuse be found for the volume in

the reader's hand. The authors can but add that one of them is
old enough to be ashamed of himself, and the other young enough

to learn better.
R. L. S.

L. O.
CHAPTER I. In Which Morris Suspects

How very little does the amateur, dwelling at home at ease,
comprehend the labours and perils of the author, and, when he

smilingly skims the surface of a work of fiction, how little does
he consider the hours of toil, consultation of authorities,

researches in the Bodleian, correspondence with learned and
illegible Germans--in one word, the vast scaffolding that was

first built up and then knocked down, to while away an hour for
him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with a

biography of Tonti--birthplace, parentage, genius probably
inherited from his mother, remarkableinstance of precocity,

etc--and a complete treatise on the system to which he bequeathed
his name. The material is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I

scorn to appear vainglorious. Tonti is dead, and I never saw
anyone who even pretended to regret him; and, as for the tontine

system, a word will suffice for all the purposes of this
unvarnished narrative.

A number of sprightly youths (the more the merrier) put up a
certain sum of money, which is then funded in a pool under

trustees; coming on for a century later, the proceeds are
fluttered for a moment in the face of the last survivor, who is

probably deaf, so that he cannot even hear of his success--and
who is certainly dying, so that he might just as well have lost.

The peculiarpoetry and even humour of the scheme is now
apparent, since it is one by which nobody concerned can possibly

profit; but its fine, sportsmanlike character endeared it to our
grandparents.

When Joseph Finsbury and his brother Masterman were little lads
in white-frilled trousers, their father--a well-to-do merchant in

Cheapside--caused them to join a small but rich tontine of
seven-and-thirty lives. A thousand pounds was the entrance fee;

and Joseph Finsbury can remember to this day the visit to the
lawyer's, where the members of the tontine--all children like

himself--were assembled together, and sat in turn in the big
office chair, and signed their names with the assistance of a

kind old gentleman in spectacles and Wellington boots. He
remembers playing with the children afterwards on the lawn at the

back of the lawyer's house, and a battle-royal that he had with a
brother tontiner who had kicked his shins. The sound of war

called forth the lawyer from where he was dispensing cake and
wine to the assembled parents in the office, and the combatants

were separated, and Joseph's spirit (for he was the smaller of
the two) commended by the gentleman in the Wellington boots, who

vowed he had been just such another at the same age. Joseph
wondered to himself if he had worn at that time little

Wellingtons and a little bald head, and when, in bed at night, he
grew tired of telling himself stories of sea-fights, he used to

dress himself up as the old gentleman, and entertain other little
boys and girls with cake and wine.

In the year 1840 the thirty-seven were all alive; in 1850 their
number had decreased by six; in 1856 and 1857 business was more

lively, for the Crimea and the Mutiny carried off no less than
nine. There remained in 1870 but five of the original members,

and at the date of my story, including the two Finsburys, but
three.

By this time Masterman was in his seventy-third year; he had long
complained of the effects of age, had long since retired from

business, and now lived in absolute seclusion under the roof of
his son Michael, the well-knownsolicitor. Joseph, on the other

hand, was still up and about, and still presented but a
semi-venerable figure on the streets in which he loved to wander.

This was the more to be deplored because Masterman had led (even
to the least particular) a model British life. Industry,

regularity, respectability, and a preference for the four per
cents are understood to be the very foundations of a green old

age. All these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he
was, ab agendo, at seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years

younger, and in the most excellent preservation, had disgraced
himself through life by idleness and eccentricity. Embarked in

the leather trade, he had early wearied of business, for which he
was supposed to have small parts. A taste for general

information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his
manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind,

unless, perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not
infrequently accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the

case of Joseph; the acute stage of this double malady, that in
which the patient delivers gratuitous lectures, soon declared

itself with severity, and not many years had passed over his head
before he would have travelled thirty miles to address an infant

school. He was no student; his reading was confined to elementary
textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even fly as high as

cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume. His lectures
were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they

were addressed direct to 'the great heart of the people', and the
heart of the people must certainly be sounder than its head, for

his lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled 'How to
Live Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year', created a sensation

among the unemployed. 'Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes,
and Desirability', gained him the respect of the shallow-minded.

As for his celebrated essay on 'Life Insurance Regarded in its
Relation to the Masses', read before the Working Men's Mutual

Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it was received with a
'literal ovation' by an unintelligent audience of both sexes, and

so marked was the effect that he was next year elected honorary
president of the institution, an office of less than no

emolument--since the holder was expected to come down with a
donation--but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.

While Joseph was thus building himself up a reputation among the
more cultivatedportion of the ignorant, his domestic life was

suddenly overwhelmed by orphans. The death of his younger brother
Jacob saddled him with the charge of two boys, Morris and John;

and in the course of the same year his family was still further
swelled by the addition of a little girl, the daughter of John

Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of small property and fewer
friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a lecture-hall in

Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned home to
make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the

lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not
without reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility,

advertised for a nurse, and purchased a second-hand perambulator.
Morris and John he made more readilywelcome; not so much because

of the tie of consanguinity as because the leather business (in
which he hastened to invest their fortune of thirty thousand

pounds) had recently exhibited inexplicable symptoms of decline.
A young but capable Scot was chosen as manager to the enterprise,

and the cares of business never again afflicted Joseph Finsbury.
Leaving his charges in the hands of the capable Scot (who was

married), he began his extensive travels on the Continent and in
Asia Minor.

With a polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the
other, he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European

languages. The first of these guides is hardly applicable to the
purposes of the philosophic traveller, and even the second is

designed more expressly for the tourist than for the expert in
life. But he pressed interpreters into his service--whenever he

could get their services for nothing--and by one means and