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Tales of the Long Bow

I have decided to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next hear from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the justice of the English people.—Yours truly,

"Welkyn of Welkin."

The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a dozen of the Prime Minister's private secretaries busy for a week, looking up encyclopædias and chronicles and books of history. But the Prime Minister himself was more worried about another problem. How did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? None of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything whatever about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are. But he had been especially protected ever since the Vegetarians a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. There were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house and garden. And from their testimony it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a grim fashion for

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