With the arrival of Minor’s first letter, saying what he had done and how ready he was for further inquiry, Murray’s hard-pressed staff discovered that life had become in theory very much simpler. From this moment forward they were not obliged only to ferret through their shelves and pigeonholes, and to trawl through thousands of existing slips for quotations that might or might not exist for a word they wanted to include. They could simply decide on a word that was giving them problems, write to Crowthorne, and ask for it. With good fortune—and with a high statistical likelihood—they would in
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