might be no living man, no man at all, but _Hermes
himself_ actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodied
_protegee_! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, and
you witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was a
truly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which in
general the copyists seemed to cling so religiously. There must
therefore be a reason, a strong reason, for vandalism such as this. And
that, at any rate, it was no longer difficult to discover; for now I
knew that the male figure was no mortal, but a god, a spirit, a DAEMON
(in the Greek sense of the word); and the female figure I saw by the
marked shortness of her drapery to be no Athenian, but a Spartan; no
matron either, but a maiden, a lass, a LASSIE; and now I had forced on
me lassie daemon, _Lacedaemon._

'This then was the badge, the so carefully-buried badge, of this
society of men. The only thing which still puzzled and confounded me at
this stage was the startling circumstance that a _Greek_ society should
make use of a _Latin_ motto. It was clear that either all my
conclusions were totally wrong, or else the motto _mens sana in corpore
sano_ contained wrapped up in itself some acroamatic meaning which I
found myself unable to penetrate, and which the authors had found no
Greek motto capable of conveying. But at any rate, having found this
much, my knowledge led me of itself one step further; for I perceived
that, widely extended as were their operations, the society was
necessarily in the main an _English,_ or at least an English-speaking
one--for of this the word "lassie" was plainly indicative: it was easy
now to conjecture London, the monster-city in which all things lose
themselves, as their head-quarters; and at this point in my
investigations I despatched to the papers the advertisement you have
seen.'

'But,' I exclaimed, 'even now I utterly fail to see by what mysterious
processes of thought you arrived at the wording of the advertisement;
even now it conveys no meaning to my mind.'

'That,' he replied,' will grow clear when we come to a right
understanding of the baleful _motive_ which inspired these men. I have
already said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only one
possible method of doing so--and that was, by all means, by any means,
to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victims
before death. It is true that I was unable to do t