’Here, however, I came to a standstill.  I was infinitely puzzled by the rod in the man’s hand.  In none of the Greek grave-reliefs does any such thing as a rod make an appearance, except in one well-known example where the god Hermes—­generally represented as carrying the caduceus, or staff, given him by Phoebus—­appears leading a dead maiden to the land of night.  But in every other example of which I am aware the sculpture represents a man living, not dead, banqueting on earth, not in Hades, by the side of his living companion.  What then could be the significance of the staff in the hand of this living man?  It was only after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, that the thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the dead female might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; that the male figure 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.’