rs, you
shall find it no joke after many days. This is what I read in the
_Lyttelton Times_, New Zealand: "The chain of circumstantial evidence
seems fairly irrefragable. From all accounts, Mr. Zangwill himself was
puzzled, after carefully forging every link, how to break it. The method
ultimately adopted I consider more ingenious than convincing." After
that I made up my mind never to joke again, but this good intention now
helps to pave the beaten path.

I. ZANGWILL.
LONDON, September, 1895.

NOTE.

The Mystery which the author will always associate with this story is
how he got through the task of writing it. It was written in a
fortnight--day by day--to meet a sudden demand from the "Star," which
made "a new departure" with it.

The said fortnight was further disturbed by an extraordinary combined
attack of other troubles and tasks. This is no excuse for the
shortcomings of the book, as it was always open to the writer to revise
or suppress it. The latter function may safely be left to the public,
while if the work stands--almost to a letter--as it appeared in the
"Star," it is because the author cannot tell a story more than once.

The introduction of Mr. Gladstone into a fictitious scene is defended on
the ground that he is largely mythical.

I. Z.

THE BIG BOW MYSTERY.

CHAPTER I.

On a memorable morning of early December London opened its eyes on a
frigid gray mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules
of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them
tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from
twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's maneuvering was more
monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull,
wretched vapor, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a
fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and
thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their
spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed
knife.

Mrs. Drabdump, of 11 Glover Street, Bow, was one of the few persons in
London whom fog did not depress. She went about her work quite as
cheerlessly as usual. She had been among the earliest to be aware of the
enemy's advent, picking out the strands of fog from the coils of
darkness the moment she rolled up her bedroom blind and unveiled the
somber picture of the winter morning. She knew that the fog had come to
s