Summary

The story begins with the narrator saying that he is only a shadow of his former healthy self, and that his ill health is because of his sufferings. He appears to be sixty and married, but is really a forty-one year old bachelor. He lost his health helping to take care of a box of guns on a two hundred mile railway journey in the winter.

Two years before, the narrator had agreed to accompany the body of a deceased friend from Cleveland, Ohio, to Wisconsin for burial. He had tacked a delivery label to a pine box that he assumed contained the body, saw the box loaded into an express car on a train, and gone to the dining car to get a sandwich and some cigars for the trip. When he returned, he was surprised to find a young...