his mind the inscription which began, "Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose, etc., etc." All at once he was aware that the face of the statue possessed a similarity to the face of someone he had known in life, and for a long time he stood there studying the sensual and vigorous countenance, attempting to relate it to some face which hovered elusively as a ghost in the back of his consciousness. And then all at once he turned sharply about and hastened back to his study where he took down from a box a faded daguerreotype. Armed with this he descended again to the garden and stood for a long time comparing the face in the daguerreotype with that of Priapus, God of Fertility.
When he returned at last to the villa, he took up his note book and made in it the last entry he was ever to make in the strange case of Miss Annie Spragg.
The strangest of all the facts (he wrote) is the likeness between the face of the statue found in the garden of the Villa Leonardo and the face in the daguerreotype portrait made of Cyrus Spragg on the day the Prophet retired into the temple at New Jerusalem, never to be seen again by any man. The daguerreotype (secured by the author after much difficulty from the daughter of one of the original Spraggites and therefore possibly a daughter of the Prophet himself) has faded with age, but not sufficiently to weaken the certainty that the face of Cyrus Spragg, the Prophet, and the face of the image of Priapus are the same face.
