ble evidences of suicide
invariably left by each self-destroyer--affords us definite and certain
means by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we are
thus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.

'But you start--you are troubled--you never heard or read of murder
such as this, the simultaneous murder of thousands over wide areas of
the face of the globe; here you feel is something outside your
experience, deeper than your profoundest imaginings. To the question
"by whom committed?" and "with what motive?" your mind can conceive no
possible answer. And yet the answer must be, "by man, and for human
motives,"--for the Angel of Death with flashing eye and flaming sword
is himself long dead; and again we can say at once, by no _one_ man,
but by many, a cohort, an army of men; and again, by no _common_ men,
but by men hellish (or heavenly) in cunning, in resource, in strength
and unity of purpose; men laughing to scorn the flimsy prophylactics of
society, separated by an infinity of self-confidence and spiritual
integrity from the ordinary easily-crushed criminal of our days.

'This much at least I was able to discover from the first; and
immediately I set myself to the detection of motive by a careful study
of each case. This, too, in due time, became clear to me,--but to
motive it may perhaps be more convenient to refer later on. What next
engaged my attention was the figures on the papyrus, and devoutly did I
hope that by their solution I might be able to arrive at some more
exact knowledge of the mystery.

'The figures round the border first attracted me, and the mere
_reading_ of them gave me very little trouble. But I was convinced that
behind their meaning thus read lay some deep esoteric significance; and
this, almost to the last, I was utterly unable to fathom. You perceive
that these border figures consist of waved lines of two different
lengths, drawings of snakes, triangles looking like the Greek delta,
and a heart-shaped object with a dot following it. These succeed one
another in a certain definite order on all the slips. What, I asked
myself, were these drawings meant to represent,--letters, numbers,
things, or abstractions? This I was the more readily able to determine
because I have often, in thinking over the shape of the Roman letter S,
wondered whether it did not owe its convolute form to an attempt on the
part of its inventor to make a picture of the _serpent;_