INTRODUCTION
persons, after reading this passage, have still persisted in insinuating that I stole my story from rumour. May I, then, declare, once and for all, that these persons are . . . mistaken.
Again I apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiæ of my bit of a newspaper story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal seats to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling's story of the ghostly Indian regiment got into my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always there; and so "The Bowmen"
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