The first thing he did was to find his "numbers" in the mass of quartered circles. And, working steadily, swiftly, but intelligently, he had, in the course of an hour, discovered, separated and jotted down, nine of the quartered disks which he believed to represent numbers; and one extra disk which he supposed to be zero. And he numbered each symbol accordingly: merely eliminating all lines except those bisecting the smaller circles. This gave him in order [Illustration] The next thing to do was to find what letters those numbers, or combinations of numbers, represented. For a while he tried English, but arrived at no convincing result. So he tried German, first making a list of the letters which were likely to occur most frequently in the written language and then trying them with the symbols which occurred most frequently in the manuscript before him. He found that the first symbol represented the figures 21. [Illustration] The twenty-first letter of the alphabet is _u_. He wrote it. The next symbol was [Illustration] for which he substituted the figures 14. The fourteenth letter of the alphabet is _n_. He had, so far, two letters, _u_ and _n_, to experiment with. He had sat for several minutes gazing absently at these two letters when, like a shot, it struck him that the French word for the number, one, was spelled _un_. Could the key of the cipher be French? He separated and jotted down the next combination of disks [Illustration] which gave him the numbers 19. The nineteenth letter of the alphabet is _s_. He wrote it. The next symbol was [Illustration] or the figure 9. The ninth letter of the alphabet is _i_. The next symbol was [Illustration] which, translated, gave him 24. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is _x_. He now had the letters _s-i-x_. And no sooner had he written them in order than the word six stared him in the face and he flushed with pure excitement. He had now two words, _un_ and _six_. The chances were that he was somewhere on the right track and he fell to work with a concentration and ardour which left him oblivious to everything else--to time and place, and to the silent, motionless little figure huddled over the pillows beside him. [Illustration: A Fragment from Guild's Notebook] At the end of an hour--checked twice--but finally overcoming apparent defeat, and always following the same method of deduction, he came to an end of his symbols, and he found the leaf from his notebook was covered with the following words in order of symbol: Un, six douze cinq cinq vingt, douze quinz' vingt-un sept eight, nineteen vingt trois nine douze douze twenty-five, eight cinq trois eight vingt, six quinze douze douze quinze vingt-trois, deux nine eighteen quatre nineteen. For these numerals spelled out capriciously in either abbreviated French or English he substituted numbers in the sequence given: