The Mayor's Wife Part 24

Ninth: Each one of these specimens, saving the first, ended in a shaded character.

Tenth: While some of the characters were squares or parts of a square, others were in the shape of a Y turned now this way and now that.

Eleventh: These characters were varied by the introduction of dots, and, in some cases, by the insertion of minute sketches of animals, birds, arrows, signs of the zodiac, etc., with here and there one of a humorous, possibly sarcastic, nature.

Twelfth: Dots and dots only were to be found in the specimen emanating from Mrs. Packard's hand; birds, arrows, skipping boys and hanging men, etc., being confined to No. 5, the product of another brain and hand, at present unknown.

Now what conclusions could I draw from these? I shall give them to you as they came to me that night. Others with wits superior to my own may draw additional and more suggestive ones:

First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made in some other way than by breaks.

Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No. 1 meant nothing--that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.

Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of the first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing for the same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or phrase as a complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and always to her dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all but the simple one with which she had started.

Fourth: No. 1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in itself.

Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading fell.

Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape or nature.

Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.

Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show the first one to be a word of one letter. There are but two words in the English language of one letter--a and i--and in the specimens before me but one character, that of [], which shows shading, next to another shaded character.

Ninth: [] was therefore a or i

A decided start.

All this, of course, was simply preliminary.

The real task still lay before me. It was to solve the meaning of those first seven characters, which, if my theory were correct, was a communication in itself, and one of such importance that, once mastered, it would give the key to the whole situation.

[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;>

or with the shading (same in bold - transcriber)

[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;>

You have all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet.

Let us see if it applies to this one.

There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Are there twenty-six or nearly twenty-six different characters, in the one hundred and one I find inscribed on the various slips spread out before me?

No, there are but fourteen. A check to begin with.

But wait; the dots make a difference. Let us increase the list by a.s.suming that angles or squares thus marked are different letters from those of the same shape in which no dots or sketches occur, and we bring the list up to twenty. That is better.

The dotted or otherwise marked squares or angles are separate characters.

Now, which one of these appears most frequently? The square, which we have already decided must be either a or i. In the one short word or phrase we are at present considering, it occurs twice. Now supposing that this square stands for a, which according to Poe's theory it should, a coming before s in the frequency in which it occurs in ordinary English sentences, how would the phrase look (still according to Poe) with dashes taking the place of the remaining unknown letters?

Thus

A-a ---- if the whole is a single word.

A- a- -- if the whole is a phrase. That it was a phrase I was convinced, possibly because one clings to so neat a theory as the one which makes the shading, so marked a feature in all the specimens before us, the sign of division into words. Let us take these seven characters as a phrase then and not as a word. What follows?

The dashes following the two a's stand for letters, each of which should make a word when joined to a. What are these letters? Run over the alphabet and see. The only letters making sense when joined with a are h, m, n, s, t or x. Discarding the first and the last, we have these four words, am, an, as, at. Is it possible to start any intelligible phrase with any two of these arranged in any conceivable way? No. Then [] can not stand for a. Let us see if it does for i. The words of two letters headed by i we find to be if, in, is and it. A more promising collection than the first. One could easily start a phrase with any of these, even with any two of them such as If it, Is in, Is it, It is. []

is then the symbol of i, and some one of the above named combinations forms the beginning of the short phrase ending with a word of three letters symbolized by V [-].<>

What word?

If my reasoning is correct up to this point, it should not be hard to determine.

First, one of these three symbols, the V, is a repet.i.tion of one of those we have already shown to be s, t, f, or n. Of the remaining two, [-] <, one="" must="" be="" a="" vowel,="" that="" is,="" it="" must="" be="" either="" u,="" e,="" o,="" u,="" or="" y;="" i="" being="" already="" determined="" upon.="" now="" how="" many="" [-]'s="" and=""><'s do="" we="" find="" in="" the="" collection="" before="" us?="" ten="" or="" more="" of="" the="" first,="" and="" six,="" or="" about="" six,="" of="" the="" latter.="" recalling="" the="" table="" made="" out="" by="" poe--a="" table="" i="" once="" learned="" as="" a="" necessary="" part="" of="" my="" schooling="" as="" a="" cipher="" interpreter--i="" ran="" over="" it="" thus:="" e="" is="" the="" one="" letter="" most="" in="" use="" in="" english.="" afterward="" the="" succession="" runs="" thus="" a,="" o,="" i="" d,="" h,="" n,="" r,="" etc.="" there="" being="" then="" ten="" [-]'s="" to="" six=""><'s [-]="" must="" be="" a="" vowel,="" and="" in="" all="" probability="" the="" vowel="" e,="" as="" no="" other="" character="" in="" the="" whole="" collection,="" save="" the="" plentiful="" squares,="" is="" repeated="" so="">

I am a patient woman usually, but I was nervous that night, and, perhaps, too deeply interested in the outcome to do myself justice. I could think of no word with a for one of its three letters which would make sense when added on to It is, Is it, I f it, Is in.

Conscious of no mistake, yet always alive to the possibility of one, I dropped the isolated sc.r.a.p I was working upon and took up the longer and fuller ones, and with them a fresh line of reasoning. If my argument so far had been trustworthy, I should find, in these other specimens, a double [-][-] standing for the double e so frequently found in English.

Did I find such? No. Another shock to my theory.

Should I, then, give it up? Not while another means of verification remained. The word the should occur more than once in a collection of words as long as the one before me. If U is really e, I should find it at the end of the supposed thes. Do I so find it? There are several words scattered through the whole, of only three letters. Are any of them terminated by U? Not one. My theory is false, then, and I must begin all over.

Discarding every previous conclusion save this, that the shading of a line designated the termination of a word, I hunted first for the thes. Making a list of the words containing only three letters, I was confronted by the following:

V [-] <>

)L )C C

< l="">

^V L V. < c="" ^v.="" .="">.[-]) )L. .V ).C L.

.<.[-] )7="">

^V C 7

)L.L >

No two alike. Astonishing! Thirty-two words of English and only one the in the whole? Could it be that the cipher was in a foreign language?

The preponderance of i's so out of proportion to the other vowels had already given me this fear, but the lack of thes seemed positively to indicate it. Yet I must dig deeper before accepting defeat.

Th is a combination of letters which Poe says occurs so often in our language that they can easily be picked out in a cipher of this length.

How many times can a conjunction of two similar characters be found in the lines before us..>.[-] occurs three times, which is often enough, perhaps, to establish the fact that they stand for th. Do I find them joined with a third character in the list of possible thes? Yes..> [-]

which would seem to fix both the th and the e.