My own little detective work

I was reading Sherlock Holmes this afternoon and I started a new story in my volume II of the complete novels and stories.

The intro seemed really familiar, and I was practically sure I'd already read a story that started the same way in the first volume, but the mystery I didn't remember.

Now that I'm home, I skimmed through my books and verified it: "The Resident Patient" and "The Adventure of the Cardbard Box" both start with the exact same scene between Holmes and Watson. At the point where Holmes introduces the problem/mystery or client, the stories diverge, but the first two pages are word for word the same.

I wonder how that happened. Surely Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wouldn't have thought his avid fans so dumb as to not notice when he reused the same intro. An editing error, perhaps? I noticed a fair number of type-o's in the first volume, things like "rn" instead of "m" or "cl" instead of "d". Maybe one of the stories was unpublished/unfinished in Doyle's time, and some compiler or editor mistakenly put the intro onto a second story.

Or maybe when the stories were originally published in magazines and thus months and eventually years apart from each other, Doyle thought his readers wouldn't remember a story published years before in a different magazine.

As for the wedding, I'm leaning more towards not going. I looked at the invitation, and the civil ceremony is only at 4pm, which means there's practically no way I could leave at a decent hour to make the 2 hour drive back to Toulouse. I can't really afford to stay in a hotel (especially for someone I barely know) and I don't feel like couch surfing it. Sunday evening B and I are heading back to Montpellier/Nîmes to his parents' house, so if I went to the wedding on Saturday, I'd drive halfway there, then back to Toulouse, then down to Tarascon sur Ariège/Foix on Sunday, and then to B's parents'. The reception is at the Chateau de Lignan north of Bèziers, which does seem really neat, but (this is going to sound very French of me) I don't think it'll be the last time I'm invited to some event at a Chateau. Not that I've been to one yet or will soon, but it's the kind of thing that happens more often in France.