Nothing but trouble can ensue when Bertie Wooster''s Aunt Dahlia instructs him to steal a silver jug from Totleigh Towers, home of magistrate and hell-hound, Sir Watkin Bassett. First he must face the peril of Sir Watkin''s droopy daughter, Madeleine, and then the terrors of would-be Dictator, Roderick Spode and his gang of Black Shorts. But when duty calls, Bertram answers, and so there follows what he himself calls the ''sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeleine Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. H. P. (''Stinker'') Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook''. In a plot with more twists than an English country lane, it takes all the ingenuity of Jeeves to extract his master from the soup again.