ative
Agency's Correspondence School of Deteckating gives the full rules
and regulations for to elucidate the mystery of threatening letters,
scurrilous letters, et cetery. Now, is this a threatening letter or a
scurrilous letter?"

"Well, it may be threatening, and it may not be threatening," said
Miss Scroggs. "If it is a threat, I must say I never heard of a threat
just like it. And if it is scurrilous, I must say I never heard of
anything that scurriled in the words used. Read it."

Philo Gubb pulled the letter from the envelope and read it. It ran
thus:--

PETUNIA:--

Open any book at page fourteen and read the first complete
sentence at the top of the page. Go thou and do likewise.

For signature there was nothing but a waved line, drawn with a pen. In
some respects it did resemble an angle-worm.

Philo Gubb frowned. "The advice of the inditer that wrote this letter
seemingly appears to be sort of unexact," he said. "'Most every book
is apt to have a different lot of words at the top of page fourteen."

"Just so!" said Miss Scroggs. "You may well say that. And say it to
myself I did until I started to open a book. I went to the book-case
and I took down my Bible and I turned to page fourteen."

"As the writer beyond no doubt thought you would," said P. Gubb.

"I don't know what he thought," said Miss Scroggs, "but when I opened
my Bible and turned to page fourteen there wasn't any page fourteen in
it. Page fourteen is part of the 'Brief Foreword from the Translators
to the Reader,' so I thought maybe it had got lost and never been
missed. So I took up another book. I took up Emerson's Essays, Volume
Two."

"And what did you read?" asked Philo Gubb.

"Nothing," said Miss Scroggs, "because I couldn't. Page fourteen was
tore out of the book. So I went through all my books, and every page
fourteen was tore out of every book. There was only one book in the
house that had a page fourteen left in it."

"And what did that say?" asked Mr. Gubb.

"It said," said Miss Petunia, "'To one quart of flour add a cup of
water, beat well, and add the beaten whites of two eggs.'"

"Did you do all that?" inquired Mr. Gubb.

"Well," said Miss Petunia, "I didn't see any harm in trying it, just
to see what happened, so I did it."

"And what happened?" asked Mr. Gubb.

"Nothing," said Miss Petunia. "In a couple of days the water dried up
and the dough got pasty and moulded, and I threw it out."

"Jus