’Having seen this much I reascended to the land of light, and being fully resolved on attending the meeting on the next day or night, and not knowing what my fate might then be, I wrote to inform you of the means by which my body might be traced.  ’But on the next day a new thought occurred to me:  I reasoned thus:  “these men are not common assassins; they wage a too rash warfare against diseased life, but not against life in general.  In all probability they have a quite immoderate, quite morbid reverence for the sanctity of healthy life.  They will not therefore take mine, unless they suppose me to be the only living outsider who has a knowledge of their secret, and therefore think it absolutely necessary for the carrying out of their beneficent designs that my life should be sacrificed.  I will therefore prevent such a motive from occurring to them by communicating to another their whole secret, and—­if the necessity should arise—­letting them know that I have done so, without telling them who that other is.  Thus my life will be assured.”  I therefore wrote to you on that day a full account of all I had discovered, giving you to understand, however, on the envelope, that you need not examine the contents for some little time.

’I waited in the subterranean vault during the greater part of the next day; but not till midnight did the confederates gather.  What happened at that meeting I shall not disclose, even to you.  All was sacred—­solemn—­full of awe.  Of the choral hymns there sung, the hierophantic ritual, liturgies, paeans, the gorgeous symbolisms—­of the wealth there represented, the culture, art, self-sacrifice—­of the mingling of all the tongues of Europe—­I shall not speak; nor shall I repeat names which you would at once recognise as familiar to you—­though I may, perhaps, mention that the “Morris,” whose name appears on the papyrus sent to me is a well-known litterateur of that name.  But this in confidence, for some years at least.

’Let me, however, hurry to a conclusion.  My turn came to speak.  I rose undaunted, and calmly disclosed myself; during the moment of hush, of wide-eyed paralysis that ensued, I declared that fully as I coincided with their views in general, I found myself unable to regard their methods with approval—­these I could not but consider too rash, too harsh, too premature.  My voice was suddenly drowned by one universal, earth-shaking roar of rage and contempt, during which I was surrounded on all sides, seized, pinioned, and dashed on the central table.  All this time, in the hope and love of life, I passionately shouted that I was not the only living being who shared in their secret.  But my voice was drowned, and drowned again, in the whirling tumult.  None heard me.  A powerful and little-known anaesthetic—­the means by which all their murders have been accomplished—­was now produced.  A cloth, saturated with the fluid, was placed on my mouth and nostrils.  I was stifled.  Sense