meaning one of what the baronet childishly calls “the lost secrets of the world”:  for every successive inquirer, believing it part of an English phrase, was thus hopelessly led astray in his investigation.  “Has” is, in fact, part of the word “Hasn-us-Sabah,” and the mere circumstance that some of it has been obliterated, while the figure of the mystic animal remains intact, shows that it was executed by one of a nation less skilled in the art of graving in precious stones than the Persians,—­by a rude, mediaeval Englishman, in short,—­the modern revival of the art owing its origin, of course, to the Medici of a later age.  And of this Englishman—­who either graved the stone himself, or got some one else to do it for him—­do we know nothing?  We know, at least, that he was certainly a fighter, probably a Norman baron, that on his arm he bore the cross of red, that he trod the sacred soil of Palestine.  Perhaps, to prove this, I need hardly remind you who Hasn-us-Sabah was.  It is enough if I say that he was greatly mixed up in the affairs of the Crusaders, lending his irresistible arms now to this side, now to that.  He was the chief of the heterodox Mohammedan sect of the Assassins (this word, I believe, is actually derived from his name); imagined himself to be an incarnation of the Deity, and from his inaccessible rock-fortress of Alamut in the Elburz exercised a sinister influence on the intricate politics of the day.  The Red Cross Knights called him Shaikh-ul-Jabal —­the Old Man of the Mountains, that very nickname connecting him infallibly with the Ul-Jabal of our own times.  Now three well-known facts occur to me in connection with this stone of the House of Saul:  the first, that Saladin met in battle, and defeated, and plundered, in a certain place, on a certain day, this Hasn-us-Sabah, or one of his successors bearing the same name; the second, that about this time there was a cordial rapprochement between Saladin and Richard the Lion, and between the Infidels and the Christians generally, during which a free interchange of gems, then regarded as of deep mystic importance, took place—­remember “The Talisman,” and the “Lee Penny”; the third, that soon after the fighters of Richard, and then himself, returned to England, the Loculus or coffin of St. Edmund (as we are informed by the Jocelini Chronica) was opened by the Abbot at midnight, and the body of the martyr exposed.  On such occasions it was customary to place gems and relics in the coffin, when it was again closed up.  Now, the chalice with the stone was taken from this loculus; and is it possible not to believe that some knight, to whom it had been presented by one of Saladin’s men, had in turn presented it to the monastery, first scratching uncouthly on its surface the name of Hasn to mark its semi-sacred origin, or perhaps bidding the monks to do so?  But the Assassins, now called, I think, “al Hasani” or “Ismaili”—­“that accursed Ishmaelite,” the baronet exclaims in one place—­still live, are still a flourishing sect impelled by fervid religious fanaticisms.  And where think you is their chief place of settlement?  Where, but on the heights of that same “Lebanon” on which Sir Jocelin “picked up” his too doubtful scribe and literary helper?