But his grandfather had told him emphatically that there was a lot in the Bible, if he read it carefully enough. There might have been in the statement no meaning deeper than an old man’s whim, but Rawley could not bring himself to believe it. Somewhere in those verses a secret lay hidden, and Rawley did not mean to give up until he had solved the problem. At daylight the next morning Rawley awoke with what he considered an inspiration. He swung out of bed and with his bathrobe over his shoulders made a stealthy pilgrimage into the old-fashioned library where the conventional aggregation of “works” were to be found in leather-bound sets. Squatting on his haunches, he inspected a certain dim corner filled with fiction of the type commonly accepted as standard. He chose a volume and returned to bed, leaving one of his heelless slippers behind him in his absorption in the mystery. He crawled back into bed and read Poe’s “Gold Bug” before breakfast, giving particular attention to the elucidation of the cipher contained in the story. The general effect of this research work was not illuminating. Poe’s cipher had been worked out with numbers, whereas Grandfather King had carelessly muffled his meaning in many words; unless the book, chapter and verse numbers were intended to convey the message in cipher similar to Poe’s. This possibility struck Rawley in the middle of his shaving. He could not wait to put the theory to the test, but hastily wiped the razor, and the lather from one side of his face, opened his grandfather’s old Bible at the index and began setting down the number of each book above its name in the reference list. Thus, I Kings, 20:3 became the numerals 11-20-3. He was eagerly at work at this when his mother called him to breakfast. His mother was a woman who worked industriously at being cultured. She had a secret ambition to be called behind her back a brilliant conversationalist. Breakfast, therefore, was always an uncomfortable meal for Rawley whenever his mother had attended some instructive gathering the evening before. While he ate his first muffin, Rawley listened to a foggy interpretation of the Swedish lecturer’s ideas upon universal brotherhood. Rather, he sat quiet while his mother talked. Then he interrupted her shockingly. “Say, Mother, do you know whether Grandfather ever read Poe?” A swallow of coffee went down his mother’s “Sunday throat.” It was some minutes before she could reply, and by that time Rawley had decided that perhaps he had better not bother his mother about the cipher. He patted her on the back, begged her pardon for asking foolish questions, and escaped to his own room, where he spent the whole day with “The Gold Bug” opened before him at the page which contained Poe’s rule concerning the frequency with which certain letters occur in the alphabet.