"Doggone it!" he repeated. "Who's gone and hid the infernal electric light in this infernal Mammoth Cave of a storeroom? And where in thunder is that box of polish and that blacking brush? I'm sure I saw 'em here the other day on one of these dad-blamed shelves. Ouch!" His exploring arm had brought what from weight and impact might have been an iron crowbar to clatter down upon his shoulders. As a matter of fact, it was the discarded handle of a patent detachable mop. "Oh, damn!" soliloquized Mr. Braid. "Everything else in the condemned world is here but what I'm after. And I haven't got any matches and I can't find the light bulb. Maybe Norah or Delia 'll know." He backed out of the cavernous closet into the hall, heading for the kitchen by way of the intervening pantry. * * * * * That vocal threat of peril from within diminished, died out. Mr. Boyce-Upchurch straightened, and in that same instant, piercing the night from a distance but drawing nearer, came to his dripping ears the warning of a real and an acute danger. A dog--a very large and a very fierce dog, to judge by its volume of noise output--was coming toward him from the right and coming very swiftly. The Thwaites' police dog, born in Germany but always spoken of by its owners as Belgian, was the self-constituted night guard of all premises in the entire block. To her vigilant senses suspicions of a prowler abroad had floated out of the void. Baying, belling, she was now bounding across lots to investigate. With a frenzied snatch, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch tore the pendent flapping thing free from its clothes-pin moorings and he thrust his two legs into its two legs and convulsively he clutched its hemmed girth about his middle, and forgetting all else save that a menacing monster was almost upon him breathing its hot panted breaths upon his flinching rear, he flung himself headlong toward that sheltering entryway from whence the blurry radiance poured. * * * * * Enlarging upon his subject, Ditto stepped into the kitchen. "As I was syin' a bit ago, tyke Mr. Boyce-Upchurch," he continued. "Look at 'm, I arsk you? Poise, composture, dignity--that's 'im agyne! It's qualities like them 'as mykes the English wot they are the 'ole world over. It's--" "Saints defind us!" shrieked Norah, starting up. In through the back door burst Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, and he slammed it to behind him and backed against it, and for a measurable space stood there speechless, transfixed, as it were, being, in a way of speaking, breeched but otherwise completely uncovered excepting for certain clingy smears of compost--compost is the word we will use, please--upon the face and torso. Delia's accompanying scream was just a plain scream but Norah's further outcry took on the form of articulated words: