fully convinced that our messenger
has gone on a bootless errand. I believe you will find that what has
really occurred is this: either yesterday, or the day before, Sir
Jocelin was found by his servant--I imagine he had a servant, though no
mention is made of any--lying on the marble floor of his chamber, dead.
Near him, probably by his side, will be found a gem--an oval stone,
white in colour--the same in fact which Ul-Jabal last placed in the
Edmundsbury chalice. There will be no marks of violence--no trace of
poison--the death will be found to be a perfectly natural one. Yet, in
this case, a particularly wicked murder has been committed. There are,
I assure you, to my positive knowledge forty-three--and in one island
in the South Seas, forty-four--different methods of doing murder, any
one of which would be entirely beyond the scope of the introspective
agencies at the ordinary disposal of society.

'But let us bend our minds to the details of this matter. Let us ask
first, _who_ is this Ul-Jabal? I have said that he is a Persian, and of
this there is abundant evidence in the narrative other than his mere
name. Fragmentary as the document is, and not intended by the writer to
afford the information, there is yet evidence of the religion of this
man, of the particular sect of that religion to which he belonged, of
his peculiar shade of colour, of the object of his stay at the
manor-house of Saul, of the special tribe amongst whom he formerly
lived. "What," he asks, when his greedy eyes first light on the
long-desired gem, "what is the meaning of the inscription 'Has'"--the
meaning which _he_ so well knew. "One of the lost secrets of the
world," replies the baronet. But I can hardly understand a learned
Orientalist speaking in that way about what appears to me a very patent
circumstance: it is clear that he never earnestly applied himself to
the solution of the riddle, or else--what is more likely, in spite of
his rather high-flown estimate of his own "Reason"--that his mind, and
the mind of his ancestors, never was able to go farther back in time
than the Edmundsbury Monks. But _they_ did not make the stone, nor did
they dig it from the depths of the earth in Suffolk--they got it from
some one, and it is not difficult to say with certainty from whom. The
stone, then, might have been engraved by that someone, or by the
someone from whom _he_ received it, and so on back into the dimnesses
of time. And consider the char