e of _The Confessions of
Parthenio the Mystic_ as the basis of my cryptographic communication. In
the first place, each of us has in his possession a copy of the same
edition of that rare book, _viz._, the Amsterdam edition of 1698. In the
second place, there are not more than half-a-dozen copies of the same
work in England; so that if this document were by mischance to fall into
the hands of some person other than him for whom it is intended, such
person, even if sufficiently acute to guess at the means by which alone
the cryptogram can be read, would still find it a matter of some
difficulty to obtain possession of the requisite key.

"I address these lines to you, my dear Lampini, not because you and I
have been friends from youth, not because we have shared many dangers
and hardship together, not because we have both kept the same great
object in view throughout life; in fine, I do not address them to you as
a private individual, but in your official capacity as Secretary of the
Secret Society of San Marco.

"You know how deeply I have had the objects of the Society at heart ever
since, twenty-five years ago, I was deemed worthy of being made one of
the initiated. You know how earnestly I have striven to forward its
views both in England and abroad; that through my connection with it I
am _suspect_ at nearly every capital on the Continent--that I could not
enter some of them except at the risk of my life; that health, time,
money--all have been ungrudgingly given for the furtherance of the same
great end.

"Heaven knows I am not penning these lines in any self-gratulatory frame
of mind--I who write from this happy haven among the hills.
Self-gratulation would ill-become such as me. Where I have given gold,
others have given their blood. Where I have given time and labour,
others have undergone long and cruel imprisonments, have been separated
from all they loved on earth, and have seen the best years of their life
fade hopelessly out between the four walls of a living tomb. What are my
petty sacrifices to such as these?

"But not to everyone is granted the happiness of cementing a great cause
with his heart's blood. We must each work in the appointed way--some of
us in the full light of day; others in obscure corners, at work that can
never be seen, putting in the stones of the foundation painfully one by
one, but never destined to share in the glory of building the roof of
the edifice.

"Sometimes, in your le