“I was induced by two reasons to make use 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 letters to me, especially when those letters contained any disheartening news, I have detected a tone of despondency, a latent doubt as to whether the cause to which both of us are so firmly bound was really progressing; whether it was not fighting against hope to continue the battle any longer; whether it would not be wiser to retreat to the few caves and fastnesses that were left us, and leaving Liberty still languishing in chains, and Tyranny still rampant in the high places of the world, to wage no longer a useless war against the irresistible Fates.  Happily, with you such moods were of the rarest:  you would have been more than mortal had not your soul at times sat in sackcloth and ashes.