Excellent advice; but how far likely to be taken by the eager wooer, who advertises thus?-- Wws.--Fyetw jzfc qlespc lydhpcd T hzye ldv jzf ez aczgp jzf wzgp xp. Efpdol ytrse le zyp znwznv slgp I dectyr qczx esp htyozh qzc wpeepcd. Tq jzt lcp yze lmwp le zyp T htww hlte. Rzo nzxqzce jzf xj olcwtyr htqp. “Until your father answers I won’t ask you to prove you love me. Tuesday night at one o’clock have a string from the window for letters. If you are not able at one I will wait. God comfort you, my darling wife.” Only a very simple Romeo and Juliet could expect to secure secrecy by so slight a displacement of the alphabet. When the Chevalier de Rohan was in the Bastille, his friends wanted to convey to him the intelligence that his accomplice was dead without having confessed. They did so by passing the following words into his dungeon, written on a shirt: “Mg dulhxcclgu ghj yxuj; lm ct ulgc alj.” In vain did he puzzle over the cypher, to which he had not the clue. It was too short: for the shorter a cypher letter, the more difficult it is to make out. The light faded, and he tossed on his hard bed, sleeplessly revolving the mystic letters in his brain, but he could make nothing out of them. Day dawned, and, with its first gleam, he was poring over them: still in vain. He pleaded guilty, for he could not decipher “Le prisonnier est mort; il _n’a rien dit_.” Another method of veiling a communication is that of employing numbers or arbitrary signs in the place of letters, and this admits of many refinements. Here is an example to test the reader’s sagacity: § †431 45 2+9 +§51 4= 8732+ 287 45 2+9 †¶=+ I just give the hint that it is a proverb. The following is much more ingenious, and difficult of detection. +-----------------------------------+ | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | |---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---| | A |_a_|_d_|_g_|_k_|_n_|_q_|_t_|_x_| | | | | | | | | | | | B |_b_|_e_|_h_|_l_|_o_|_r_|_u_|_y_| | | | | | | | | | | | C |_c_|_f_|_i_|_m_|_p_|_s_|_w_|_z_| +-----------------------------------+ Now suppose that I want to write _England_; I look among the small letters in the foregoing table for _e_, and find that it is in a horizontal line with B, and vertical line with B, so I write down _B_B; _n_ is in line with A and E, so I put AE; continue this, and England will be represented by _Bbaeacbdaaaeab_. Two letters to represent one is not over-tedious: but the scheme devised by Lord Bacon is clumsy enough. He represented every letter by permutations of _a_ and _b_; for instance, A was written _aaaaa_, B was written _aaaab_ C " " _aaaba_, D " " _aabaa_ and so through the alphabet. Paris would thus be transformed into _abbba, aaaaa, baaaa, abaaa, baaab_. Conceive the labour of composing a whole despatch like this, and the great likelihood of making blunders in writing it!