We did not have a very bright talk. There were few present, and we had only the subject of last week. MARGARET did not speak at length. WHEELER had been ill, and his physician prescribed light diet of both body and mind. Somebody spoke of Mercury sweeping the courts of the Gods, but that suggested nothing to Margaret. SARAH SHAW had a pin, with a Mercury on it, represented as holding the head of a goat. MARGARET had never seen anything that would explain it, and there was some dispute about it. E. P. P. said that, according to the Orphic Hymn, Mercury sought the love of Dryope under the form of a goat. Pan was the fruit of that amour. In this form also he wooed Diana. We wandered from our subject a little, to hear MR. MACK talk about the Gorgons. He thought they stood for the three sides of human nature. Medusa, the chief care-taker, the body, was the only one not immortal, and the only one beautiful. Stheno and Euryale, wide-extended force and wide-extended scope, represented spirit and intellect, essentially immortal. The changing of Medusa’s curls (or elements of strength) into serpents represented the fall. It was not the Gorgons who had but one eye and one tooth between them, but three sister guardians, whom Perseus was compelled to destroy before he could reach Medusa. MR. MACK did not tell us why human nature so divided had a certain petrifying power! E. P. P. thought the intellect, not the body, was the care-taker. Mr. Mack tried in vain to explain, owing, I think, to his German misconception of words. Certainly the five senses are the _providers_, which was what he must have meant. MARGARET liked his theory, because there was a place in it for sin! She disliked failure. Perhaps we all had perceived her attachment to evil! Not that she wished men to fall into it, but it must be accepted as one means of final good. The only copies of Bode belong to Edward Everett and Theodore Parker. Neither is at this moment to be had. The talk turned on the age of the Orphic idea. The Orphic Hymns, WHEELER said, were merely hymns of initiation into the Orphic mysteries. They were altered by every successive priesthood, and finally by the Christian Platonists. Those now remaining were undoubtedly their work. Perhaps the ancient formulas were still hidden in them. We know the beautiful story of Orpheus. If he indeed represents many, yet all that has been said of him is also true of one. MR. MACK declared that Eurydice represented the true faith! She was killed by an envenomed serpent, which might possibly stand for an enraged priesthood! I got a little impatient here, and said I did not care to know about the Hymns; but the Orphic idea, which made Scaliger speak of the Hymns as the “Liturgy of Satan,”—how old was that? MARGARET could not guess why he called them so. CHARLES WHEELER said that, since they made a heathen worship attractive, perhaps he fancied them a device of the Evil One! Too great a compliment to Scaliger, I thought.