Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)Riley, James Whitcomb
General
Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)
Riley, James Whitcomb
American wit and humor
Financial circles here have been a good deal interested in the discovery
of a cipher which was recently adopted by a depositor and which began to
attract the attention at first of a gentleman employed in the
Clearing-House. He was telling me about it and showing me the vouchers
or duplicates of them.
It was several months ago that he first noticed on the back of a check
passing through the Clearing-House the following cipher, written in a
symmetrical, Gothic hand:
DEAR SIR:--Herewith find payment for last month's butter. It was
hardly up to the average. Why do you blonde your butter? Your
butter last month tried to assume an effeminate air, which
certainly was not consistent with its great vigor. Is it not
possible that this butter is the brother to what we had the month
previous, and that it was exchanged for its sister by mistake? We
have generally liked your butter very much, but we will have to
deal elsewhere if you are going to encourage it in wearing a full
beard.
Yours truly,
W.
Moneyed men all over Chicago and financial cryptogrammers came to read
the curious thing and to try and work out its bearing on trade.
Everybody took a look at it and went away defeated. Even the men who
were engaged in trying to figure out the identity of the Snell murderer,
took a day off and tried their Waterbury thinkers on this problem. In
the midst of it all another check passed through the Clearing-House with
this cipher, in the same hand:
SIR:--Your bill for the past month is too much. You forget the eggs
returned at the end of second week, for which you were to give me
credit. The cook broke one of them by mistake, and then threw up
the portfolio of pie-founder in our once joyous home. I will not
dock you for loss of cook, but I cannot allow you for the eggs. How
you succeed in dodging quarantine with eggs like that is a mystery
to yours truly,
W.
Great excitement followed the discovery of this indorsement on a check
for $32.87. Everybody who knew anything about ciphering was called in to
consider it. A young man from a high school near here, who made a
specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily tell how
long a shadow a nine-pound ground-hog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37
minutes p. m., on ground-hog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak.,
provided latitude and longitude and an irregular mass of red chalk be
given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests of
trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the
Exposition Building with figures and then went away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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