"You must remember," continued Miss Krieff, "that I did not think of any other language than the English. The idea of its being any dialect of the Hindustani never entered my head. So I went on this foundation, and naturally the first thought that came to me was, what letters are there in English which occur most frequently? It seemed to me if I could find this out I might obtain some key, partially, at any rate, to the letters which occurred so frequently in this writing. "I had plenty of time and unlimited patience. I took a large number of different books, written by standard authors, and counted the letters on several pages of each as they occurred. I think I counted more than two hundred pages in this way. I began with the vowels, and counted up the number of times each one occurred. Then I counted the consonants." "That never occurred to me," said Gualtier. "Why did you not tell me?" "Because I wanted you to decipher it yourself on your own principle. Of what use would it be if you only followed over my track? You would then have come only to my result. But I must tell you the result of my examination. After counting up the recurrence of all the letters on more than two hundred pages of standard authors, I made out an average of the times of their recurrence, and I have the paper here on which I wrote the average down." And Miss Krieff drew from her pocket a paper which she unfolded and showed to Gualtier. On it was the following: AVERAGE OF LETTERS. E.....222 times per page. N.....90 times per page. T.....162 times per page. L.....62 times per page. A.....120 times per page. D.....46 times per page. H.....110 times per page. C.....42 times per page. I..J..109 times per page. U..V..36 times per page. S.....104 times per page. B.....36 times per page. O.....100 times per page. W.....30 times per page. R.....100 times per page. G.....30 times per page. "The rest," said Miss Krieff, "occur on the average less than thirty times on a page, and so I did not mark them. 'F,' 'P,' and 'K' may be supposed to occur more frequently than some others; but they do not. "'E,' then," she continued, "is the letter of first importance in the English language. 'A,' and 'T,' and 'H,' are the next ones. Now there are some little words which include these letters, such as 'the.' 'And' is another word which may be discovered and deciphered, it is of such frequent occurrence. If these words only can be found, it is a sign at least that one is on the right track. There are also terminations which seem to me peculiar to the English language; such as 'ng,' 'ing,' 'ed,' 'ly,' and so on. At any rate, from my studies of the Italian, French, and German, and from my knowledge of Hindustani, I know that there are no such terminations in any of the words of those languages. So you see," concluded Miss Krieff, with a quiet smile, "the simple principle on which I acted."