little old bits of things--you know how it is. After twenty minutes'
heart-and-drawer-searching I decided to sacrifice a policeman's helmet and
a sock, the upper of which had outlasted the toe and heel. I bore these
downstairs and laid them at Aunt Angela's feet.

"What's this?" said she, stirring the helmet disdainfully with her toe.

"Relic of the Great War. The Crown Prince used to wear it in wet weather to
keep the crown dry."

Aunt Angela sniffed and picked up the sock with the fire-tongs. "And this?"

"A sock, of course," I explained. "An emergency sock of my own invention.
It has three exits, you will observe, very handy in case of fire."

"Hump!" said Aunt Angela.

Edward returned bearing his offerings, a gent's rimless boater, a doorknob,
six inches of lead-piping and half a bottle of cod-liver oil.

"Hump!" said Aunt Angela.

No more was said of it that night. Aunt Angela resumed her sewing, Edward
his _Gertie_, I my slumb--, my meditations. Nor indeed was the jumble sale
again mentioned, a fact which in itself should have aroused my suspicions;
but I am like that, innocent as a sucking-dove. I had put the matter out of
my mind altogether until yesterday evening, when, hearing the sound of
laboured breathing and the frantic clanking of a bicycle pump proceeding
from the shed, I went thither to investigate, and was nearly capsized by
Edward charging out.

"It's gone," he cried--"gone!" and pawed wildly for his stirrup.

"What has?" I inquired.

"'The Limit,'" he wailed. "She's picked ... lock ... muck-room with a
hairpin, sent ... Limit ... jumble sale!"

He sprang aboard his cycle and disappeared down the high road to St.
Gwithian, pedalling like a squirrel on a treadmill, the tails of his new
mackintosh spread like wings on the breeze. So Aunt Angela with serpentine
guile had deferred her raid until the last moment and then bagged "The
Limit," the pride of the muck-room.

"The Limit," I should tell you, is (or was) a waterproof. It is a faithful
record of Edward's artistic activities during the last thirty years, being
decorated all down the front with smears of red, white and green paint.
Here and there it has been repaired with puncture patches and strips of
surgical plaster, but more often it has not. As Edward is incapable of
replacing a button and Aunt Angela refuses to touch the "Limit," he knots
himself into it with odds and ends of string and has to be liberated by his
ally, the cook,