The Baron and his friend Bunker, having escaped the asylum in an earlier volume, descend on an English country house under invented titles and proceed to court, duel and dine their way through it. Clouston was an Orkney barrister who turned to farce; the machine is a Wodehouse machine ten years early, and the Baron's German gravity in the face of English nonsense is the whole joke. Sixty plates of painting by Tissot, Orpen and their contemporaries, running from 1795 to 1928, catch the ballrooms, rivalries and sunlight of the world the Baron blunders through.
