The lost property office of the metro receives about nine thousand items a year and returns roughly a third of them. The rest live in a basement in labelled boxes for ninety days, after which they are sold, donated or destroyed. Umbrellas dominate. So do gloves, always singly, never in pairs, which suggests something about how people lose things that nobody has fully explained. Then there is the second category, which the staff find harder. A wedding dress, wrapped, unclaimed. A box of hearing aid batteries. A folder of children's drawings with names and dates on the back, going back four years. A violin. These are not forgotten in the ordinary sense. Somebody has noticed. Somebody, in most cases, is looking. The reason they do not arrive at the office is almost always that people do not know it exists, or they assume that anything left on a train is gone. The staff keep a separate shelf, informally, for objects that are clearly irreplaceable. Officially the ninety-day rule applies to everything. The supervisor has worked there nineteen years. He says the drawings are the worst, because a parent will come eventually, and the longer it takes the more certain he becomes that they will, and then the ninety days pass. Once, a man came for a coat he had lost eleven months earlier. It was gone, obviously. He knew that. He had come anyway, because his wife had died in the interval and the coat had been hers, and he wanted to be told properly that it was not there. The supervisor made him tea and told him properly. That is not in the procedure either.