Egypt -- Description and travel -- Humor; London (England) -- Description and travel -- Humor; Voyages and travels -- Humor
Alas, it was a day-dream. Every palace that was closed seemed to be
really closed, and when we did find the gendarme who was to be
humiliated, we discovered that we couldn't speak his language, and,
besides, we felt so humble in his presence that we wouldn't have
ventured to talk to him under any circumstances.
We travelled in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Germany,
Switzerland, Italy, and France, crossing and recrossing frontiers, and
we never encountered a man, woman or child who would consent to look at
our passports.
On the other hand, the cable code is something that no tourist should
be without. Whenever he is feeling blue or downcast he can open the
code book and get a few hearty laughs. Suppose he wishes to send a
message to his brother in Toledo. The code permits him to concentrate
his message into the tabloid form and put a long newsy letter into two
or three words. He opens the blue book and finds that he can send any
of the following tidings to Toledo:
_Adjunctio_--Apartments required are engaged and will be ready for
occupation on Wednesday.
_Amalior_--Bills of lading have not been endorsed.
_Animatio_--Twins, boy and girl, all well.
_Collaria_--Received invitation to dinner and theatre, _Illaqueo_--Have
a fly at the station to meet train arriving at eight o'clock.
_Napina_--Machinery out of order. Delay will be great.
_Remissus_--Can you obtain good security?
And so on, page after page. Theoretically, this vest pocket volume is
a valuable helpmate, but when Mr. Peasley wanted to cable Iowa to have
his Masonic dues paid and let Bill Levison take the river farm for
another year and try to collect the money from Joe Spillers, the code
book did not seem to have the proper equivalents.
We had with us on the boat an American who carried a very elaborate
code book. All the way up from Plymouth to London he was working on a
cablegram to his wife. When he turned it over to the operator, this is
the joyous message that went singing through the water back to New York:
"LIZCAM, New York. Hobgoblin buckwheat explosion manifold cranberry
suspicious.
"JAMES."
He showed us a copy and seemed to be very proud of it.
"That's what you save by having a code," he explained.
"What will Lizcam think when he receives that?"
"He? That's my wife's registered cable address. 'Liz' for Lizzie and
'Cam' for Campbell. Her maiden name was Lizzie Campbell."
"Well, what does that mean about a buckwheat hobgoblin having a
suspicious explosion?"
"Oh, those words are selected arbitrarily to represent full sentences
in the code. When my wife gets that cable she will look up those words
one after the other and elaborate the message so that it will read like
this:
He showed us the following:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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