"1--6--12--5--5--20--12--15--21--7--8--19 --23--9--12--12--25--8--5--3--8--20--6--15 --12--12--15--23--2--9--18--4--19." Then for the figure 1 he wrote the first letter of the alphabet--_A_. For the number six he wrote the sixth letter of the alphabet _F_. For the number 12, the twelfth letter of the alphabet _L_. And when he had written letters for every figure in order given he had on his sheet of paper A FLEETLOUGHSWILLYHECHTFOLLOW BIRDS After a while he separated the words _A_, _Fleet_, _Follow_, and _Birds_, leaving the unintelligible sequence of letters LOUGHSWILLYHECHT. Out of this, for a long while, he could make nothing, until, by chance, taking the last five letters together, it suddenly occurred to him that the German word for pike was HECHT. Then, in a flash, he remembered the badly drawn picture of a pike and its young. Pike or Hecht, that was one of the words in all probability. But what _other_ word the word Hecht represented he could not imagine. He looked at his notebook again. The letters remaining were LOUGHSWILLY. They meant absolutely nothing in any language he had even heard of. He studied what he already had--A Fleet (Blank) Pike Follow Birds. A _pike_ follow _Birds_--_birds_--and swift as lightning a thought struck him which set him tingling to his finger-tips: somewhere in that rough, hasty, and apparently innocent sketch in which oddly shaped trees and a line of little birds figured, lay the key to the whole thing. He felt it, he _knew_ it. He spread out the drawing on his knees and studied it with terrible concentration, conscious somehow or other that something about it, something _in_ it, was vaguely familiar to him. _What?_ Had he ever before seen another sketch by the same hand? He could not recollect. It was like millions of rough, hasty sketches jotted down by painters as notes for their own guidance only and not for others to see. What was there about it unusual? The trees? The _shapes_ of the trees. Ah! he was getting nearer the goal--he realized it, felt it, and, balked, fell into a mental rage for a moment. Then his habitual self-command returned; he squared his jaws, gazed grimly at the trees, and forced himself once more to answer his own questions. The shapes of the trees, then, were unusual. He had gotten that far. What was unusual in their shapes? The trunks and branches? No. The foliage. No. The outline! "God!" he whispered. And he had it. Over the sofa was hanging a map of the British Isles and of the Western coast of Europe. Dotted lines indicated the course taken by the Holland Line steamers. He reached up, unhooked it, looked at it, then at the drawing in his hand. Then he detached half of the thin sheet of paper on which the sketch was drawn and laid it over the sketch. Being translucent to the verge of transparency, he could see the drawing beneath the thin sheet covering it. Then, with his pencil, he steadily traced the _outlines_ of the trees.