e, 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, then, of the union of
wisdom with wealth--true wisdom with real wealth; lastly, and above
all, he was thrown by the Delphians from a rock on accou