’After some time the answer to the advertisement at length arrived; but what was my disgust to find that it was perfectly unintelligible to me.  I had asked for a date and an address:  the reply came giving a date, and an address, too—­but an address wrapped up in cypher, which, of course, I, as a supposed member of the society, was expected to be able to read.  At any rate, I now knew the significance of the incongruous circumstance that the Latin proverb mens sana etc. should be adopted as the motto of a Greek society; the significance lay in this, that the motto contained an address—­the address of their meeting-place, or at least, of their chief meeting-place.  I was now confronted with the task of solving—­and of solving quickly, without the loss of an hour—­this enigma; and I confess that it was only by the most violent and extraordinary concentration of what I may call the dissecting faculty, that I was able to do so in good time.  And yet there was no special difficulty in the matter.  For looking at the motto as it stood in cypher, the first thing I perceived was that, in order to read the secret, the heart-shaped figure must be left out of consideration, if there was any consistency in the system of cyphers at all, for it belonged to a class of symbols quite distinct from that of all the others, not being, like them, a picture-letter.  Omitting this, therefore, and taking all the other vowels and consonants whether actually represented in the device or not, I now got the proverb in the form mens sana in ... pore sano. I wrote this down, and what instantly struck me was the immense, the altogether unusual, number of liquids in the motto—­six in all, amounting to no less than one-third of the total number of letters!  Putting these all together you get mnnnnr, and you can see that the very appearance of the “m’s” and “n’s” (especially when written) running into one another, of itself suggests a stream of water.  Having previously arrived at the conclusion of London as the meeting-place, I could not now fail to go on to the inference of the Thames; there, or near there, would I find those whom I sought.  The letters “mnnnnr,” then, meant the Thames:  what did the still remaining letters mean?  I now took these remaining letters, placing them side by side:  I got aaa, sss, ee, oo, p and i.  Juxtaposing these nearly in the order indicated by the frequency of their occurrence, and their place in the Roman alphabet, you at once and inevitably get the word Aesopi. And now I was fairly startled by this symmetrical proof of the exactness of my own deductions in other respects, but, above all, far above all, by the occurrence of that word "Aesopi." For who was Aesopus?  He was a slave who was freed for his wise and witful sallies:  he is therefore typical of the liberty of the wise—­their moral manumission from temporary and narrow law; he was also a close friend of Croesus:  he is typical,