1.  When I took your letter into my hand, I underwent an experience worth telling.  I looked at it with the awe due to a document making some state announcement, and as I was breaking the wax, I felt a dread greater than ever guilty Spartan felt at sight of the Laconian scytale. i.e. the staff or baton used at Sparta for dispatches.  The strip of leather on which the communication was to be made is said to have been rolled slantwise round it, and the message was then written lengthwise.  The correspondent was said to have a staff of a size exactly corresponding, and so by rewinding the strip could read what was written.  Vide Aulus Gellius xvii. 9.