A CHRISTMAS PRESENT.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 416, 29 March 1877, Page 3

A CHRISTMAS PRESENT.

F. H. C. writes to the • Times that a few days before Christmas he received " an interesting-looking case," which turned out to contain a dozen of champagne* There being nothing to show whence it came, 1\ H. C. took it for an anonymous Christmas present, and, it would Beem, consumed it. On January 5, however, there came a letter from a London wine merchant stating that his clerk had omitted to post a letter on the 12th December, announcing the merchant's intention to send a sample dozen, unless he should hear anything to the contrary within three or four days, " and of course expecting payment for the same." Thereupon P. H. C asks, " Is a tradesman with whom one has never dealt justified in sending wine without order at Christmas-time ?" Surely he is justified, or at other time. So far there is no offence at all. But the question continues : " Is one bound to pay for what one has unsuspectingly consumed, taking it to be a gift ?" To this answer is that the consumer is under these circumstances equally justified in declining to pay. The very case is thus resolved by Mr. Benjamin in his learned and acute work on the law of sale. Nay, more, if F. H. C. had received the wine merchants letter he would have been in no way bound to answer it, for the party who first proposes a transaction has no right whatever to throw on the other party the burden of communicating a refusal. This device of affecting to presume assent from silence likewise occurs, by the way, in the solicitations one receives every now and then

from the agents of Continental lotteries. If on the strength of this unauthorised presumption the wine had then been Sent, F. H. Q. might have refused to receive it • or if it had been received by reason of the nature and sender of the goods not bein<* apparent till the case was opened, F. S. C. would have had no further duty in the matter than to inform the merchant that the wine was not accepted, and lay at the sender's risk; indeed it Is not certain that he would in strictness be bound even to do that.—' Pall Mall Budget. 1