Discarding every previous conclusion save this, that the shading of a line designated the termination of a word, I hunted first for the thes. Making a list of the words containing only three letters, I was confronted by the following: V [-] < )L )C C < L > ^V L V. < C ^V. .>.[-]) )L. .V ).C L. .<.[-] )7 ^V C 7 )L.L > No two alike. Astonishing! Thirty-two words of English and only one the in the whole? Could it be that the cipher was in a foreign language? The preponderance of i’s so out of proportion to the other vowels had already given me this fear, but the lack of thes seemed positively to indicate it. Yet I must dig deeper before accepting defeat. Th is a combination of letters which Poe says occurs so often in our language that they can easily be picked out in a cipher of this length. How many times can a conjunction of two similar characters be found in the lines before us..>.[-] occurs three times, which is often enough, perhaps, to establish the fact that they stand for th. Do I find them joined with a third character in the list of possible thes? Yes..> [-] which would seem to fix both the th and the e. But I have grown wary and must make myself sure. Do I find a word in which this combination of. >.[-] occurs twice, as sometimes happens with the th we are considering? No, but I find two other instances in which like contiguous symbols do appear twice in one word; the.<.[-] in No. 3 and the.V.)C in No. 4--a discovery the most embarrassing of all, since in both cases the symbols which begin the word are reversed at its end, as witness:.V.)C - - - )C .V --.<.[-] - - -.[-].<. For, if.V )C stands for th, and the whole word showed in letters th- - -ht, which to any eye suggests the word thought, what does.<.[-] stand for, concerning which the same conditions are observable? I could not answer. I had run on a snag. Rules which applied to one part of the cipher failed in another. Could it be that a key was necessary to its proper solution? I began to think so, and, moreover, that Mrs. Packard had made use of some such help as I watched her puzzling in the window over these symbols. I recalled her movements, the length of time which elapsed before the cry of miserable understanding escaped her lips, the fact that her dress was torn apart at the throat when she came out, and decided that she had not only drawn some paper from her bosom helpful to the elucidation of these symbols, but that this paper was the one which had been the object of her frantic search the night I watched her shadow on the wall.