“Well, after that discovery you may imagine how minutely I went over the whole surface of the glass in search of further light. Of course, I did not neglect the inscription on the scroll of Zechariah—‘Upon one stone are seven eyes,’ but I very quickly concluded that this must refer to some mark on a stone which could only be found _in situ_, where the treasure was concealed. To be short, I made all possible notes and sketches and tracings, and then came back to Parsbury to work out the cipher at leisure. Oh, the agonies I went through! I thought myself very clever at first, for I made sure that the key would be found in some of the old books on secret writing. The _Steganographia_ of Joachim Trithemius, who was an earlier contemporary of Abbot Thomas, seemed particularly promising; so I got that and Selenius’s _Cryptographia_ and Bacon’s _de Augmentis Scientiarum_ and some more. But I could hit upon nothing. Then I tried the principle of the ‘most frequent letter’, taking first Latin and then German as a basis. That didn’t help, either; whether it ought to have done so, I am not clear. And then I came back to the window itself, and read over my notes, hoping almost against hope that the Abbot might himself have somewhere supplied the key I wanted. I could make nothing out of the colour or pattern of the robes. There were no landscape backgrounds with subsidiary objects; there was nothing in the canopies. The only resource possible seemed to be in the attitudes of the figures. ‘Job,’ I read: ‘scroll in left hand, forefinger of right hand extended upwards. John: holds inscribed book in left hand; with right hand blesses, with two fingers. Zechariah: scroll in left hand; right hand extended upwards, as Job, but with three fingers pointing up.’ In other words, I reflected, Job has _one_ finger extended, John has _two_, Zechariah has _three_. May not there be a numeral key concealed in that? My dear Gregory,” said Mr Somerton, laying his hand on his friend’s knee, “that _was_ the key. I didn’t get it to fit at first, but after two or three trials I saw what was meant. After the first letter of the inscription you skip _one_ letter, after the next you skip _two_, and after that skip _three_. Now look at the result I got. I’ve underlined the letters which form words: [D]R[E]VI[C]IOP[E]D[M]OO[M]SMV[I]V[L]IS[L]CAV[I]B[A]SB[A]TAO[V]T [R]DI[I]EAM[R]L[E]SI[P]VSP[O]D[S]EE[I]RSE[T]T[A]AE[S]GIA[V]N[N]R F[T]EEA[I]L[N]QD[P]VAI[V]M[T]LE[E]ATT[O]H[I]OO[N]VMC[A]A[T].H.Q.E.