Una esposa preocupada le pide a Sherlock Holmes que le ayude a encontrar a su marido, que ha desaparecido del hogar. Cree haberlo visto mirando en una ventana de fumadero de opio, pero cuando llega con la policía para investigar solo encuentra a un mendigo y al malvado Lascar.

Dr. Watson goes to an opium den to retrieve a patient for his distraught wife. As he is leaving with his mission accomplished, he is astonished to hear his friend Sherlock Holmes’s voice from an unfamiliar face. Of course Holmes is there working on a case, and he draws Watson into his confidence. A businessman has disappeared, and his wife claims that she last saw him in the window of the opium den. When the authorities searched for him, they found a beggar in the room with the missing man’s clothing. The conclusion was that the beggar had murdered the missing man. But where was the body?

Naturally all was not as it seemed, and it took Sherlock Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction to get to the truth. The real story is one of the funniest of Holmes’s cases. The beggar was the missing man. He had discovered that he could make more money from begging than he could earn as a professional man, so he had been leading a double life. He was cornered by his wife’s unexpected appearance, and he needed Holmes’s help to extract himself from a delicate situation. ( )

Une collection parfaite pour ceux qui veulent progresser dans l'apprentissage d'une langue tout en se faisant plaisir à la lecture d'un bon roman de littérature étrangère. Page de gauche : le texte de l'auteur en version originale et page de droite : la traduction en français. Rien de plus simple pour améliorer son vocabulaire et sa compréhension…