“‘M. B. Am now safe on board a barge moored below Tower Bridge, where no one will think of looking for me. Have good friends but little money owing to action of police. Trust, little girl, you still believe in my innocence although things seem against me. There are reasons why I should not be questioned. Shall try to embark before the mast in some outward-bound vessel. Crews will not be scrutinized as sharply as passengers. There are those who will let you know my movements. Fear the police may tamper with your correspondence, but later on, when hue and cry have died down, will let you know all.’” It all seems simple to the man who follows the idea closely, but Captain Hitt proceeds to make further revelations of the art. He adds: “The key to this message is CHBEF, which is not intelligible as a word, but if put into figures, indicating that the 2d, 7th, 1st, 4th, and 5th letter beyond the corresponding letter of the message has been used as a key it becomes 27145, and we connect it with the personal which appeared in the same paper the day before reading: “‘M. B. Will deposit £27 14_s._ 5_d._ tomorrow.’” This is only one of the many methods for getting under the hide of a coded message that our bright men of the Army and their cousins of the State and Navy departments have worked out through years of study and application. DRIVING IS TOO GOOD FOR THEM He—“And that night we drove the Germans back two miles.” She—“Drove them, indeed. I’d have made them walk every step of it.” NOW THEY DON’T SPEAK The Host—“I thought of sending some of these cigars out to the Front.” The Victim—“Good idea! But how can you make certain that the Germans will get them?” DIDN’T RAISE HIS BOY TO BE A “SLACKER” THEY don’t raise their boys to be gun-shy down in the mountains of Kentucky, so when John Calhoun Allen, of Clay County, heard that his son had been arrested in New York as a “slacker” he was “plumb mad.” The young man was rounded up with a bunch of other “conscientious objectors” and taken before Judge Mayer in the Federal Court. John C. junior told the judge that during his boyhood in the Kentucky mountains he had witnessed so much bloodshed that he was now opposed to fighting and had a horror of killing a man or, in fact, of being killed himself. The judge was puzzled. He had never heard before of a Kentuckian with any such complaint, so he packed the young man off to Bellevue for the “once-over” while he communicated the facts to his father down in Clay County, and, says the New York _Times_: The answer arrived in the form of the 6 feet 2 inches of John Allen himself. The mountaineer came into court just before the noon hour. He wore the boots and the corduroy trousers of the Kentucky hills. His shirt was blue, collarless, and home-made. His coat was old-fashioned, and in his hand he carried his big black sombrero. “May it please your honor,” said United States District Attorney Knox, “we have with us the father of John Calhoun Allen.”