Chapter XXXII: Cryptograph, or Cipher

BY A NAVAL SURGEON.

I do not know what first made me take to deciphering cryptograms. I do not think I have more of the Paul Pry in my nature than most of my neighbours. If, for example, I saw two lovers whispering together, or heard two people talking aloud by my side in a language which they mistakingly imagined I was not familiar with, I would put my fingers in my ears or walk right away rather than listen to a word of their secret. But seeing a letter in cipher in the ‘agony column’ of one of the dailies always appeared to me to be a kind of challenge to my ingenuity; and, at sea, I have taken the newspaper directly away to my cabin, and never raised my head from over it until I had puzzled out the cryptogram.

This would, of course, often be a work of some hours, but it passed the time away, and that itself is something to an idle sailor. Besides, there was some satisfaction in knowing that I was the only officer in the mess who could read difficult ciphers; and there was, too often, a good deal of amusement to be obtained from a perusal of these secret missives.

Thief often writes to thief, and evil-doer to evil-doer; but the letters are more often those of lover to lover, and innocent enough too--aye, and I might add ‘green’ enough, as well as innocent. Each of the two correspondents has a copy of the alphabet they write in. In this alphabet some other letter or figure is used for the real one. For example, they might put the first three letters of their mysterious alphabet thus:--

A--G
B--5
C--R

and so on through it all. Then, if they wanted to write the word ‘Cab,’ it would read ‘Rg5’ in the agony column, and who, they wonder, that has not a copy of their key, can find this out, or know that they have chosen a ‘g’ to stand for an ‘a,’ a ‘5’ for a ‘b,’ an ‘r’ for a ‘c,’ and so forth.

But simple ciphers, when one letter or figure is substituted for another, are very easily read. If I saw the following, for instance: ‘2ssx 2s 5! 2??tnpo7x gn?ts 2! W?wwsx6,’ as soon as I glanced my eye over it I should be struck with the triple recurrence of double letters. Thus, in the first word, there are double S’s, in the fourth double marks of interrogation, and in the seventh double W’s.

Then I would ask the question of myself, ‘What are the letters most commonly doubled in the English language?’ They are the vowels e and o at the beginning of words; the consonants p, r, l, m, n, in the middle of words; and the letter s or l at the end. The double letters in the word 2ssx I guess as ‘E’s.’ Well, a consonant would come before them, and what one more natural than ‘m.’ ‘Mee,’ and the ‘x’ must be ‘t.’ ‘Meet me;’ and after a little more thinking, puzzling, and conjecture, we would make out the cipher as ‘Meet me by moonlight alone, my poppets.’ Of course this would not be all the cipher; there would very likely be several words more, and this would make it all the less difficult to read.

Now take a further illustration, that presented by the ‘Language of the Restless Fays,’ as published some years ago:--

Here you have two very well-known verses written in the language of the Restless Fays. It is exactly the same as English, excepting in the forms of its letters. The Fays have twenty-six distinct positions, one for each letter of the alphabet. Now, who can read these verses? The first letter is an ‘L.’

Glancing over the verses, we find two of the same Fay that ends the first word standing together in the second word of the sixth line, and next to the first letter; they must, therefore, we think, be ‘O’s’ or ‘E’s,’ but ‘O’s’ do not often end words, so they must be ‘E’s.’ Down with them as ‘E’s.’ Our first word would now have got as far as this, ‘L . . . l e,’ the dots representing the letters still to be supplied; the second letter _must_ be a vowel, and the double ones, therefore, consonants. Now run over the alphabet in your own mind, and see what two consonants are most likely to make sense before the finals _l e_. Why two ‘T’s’ would, and an ‘I’ before that completes the word ‘Little.’

Now we have _four_ known letters to begin the battle, so we go over every line and top the Fays wherever we find them representing ‘L’s,’ ‘I’s,’ ‘T’s,’ or ‘E’s.’ But the second words of the third, the fourth, and the eighth lines are precisely the same. They are words of three letters, and they end in the Fay we call ‘E.’ Now what is the commonest word of three letters in our language ending in ‘E’? Why ‘the,’ to be sure. These little words must be ‘the’s,’ so we mark them so, and this gives us another letter, namely, ‘H.’ Then we mark all our ‘H’s’--they are but few--and go on again rejoicing; and presently our eagle eye is riveted on the first word of the fourth line represented by three Fays, one kneeling like a volunteer, the other standing on his head, and the last touching his left toe, and we are not slow to notice that the last word in the same line ends with those three foolish Fays, preceded by an ‘L.’ So the second letter of that word must be a vowel, and it is neither ‘E’ nor ‘I.’ So it must be ‘O’ or ‘A.’ But the word ‘and’--a very common one--would with an ‘L’ prefixing it make the word ‘Land.’ Hurrah! we have it then. The first word of the line is ‘and’; the last is ‘land.’ And we hasten to put down all the ‘N’s’ and ‘A’s’ and ‘D’s’ in the verses over the heads of the representative Fays as before.

Glancing over the lines we find we have got nearly all the last word in the fifth line except the first and the two last letters, thus:--. I N D N E. . The two last are the same, two mad little Fays, running apparently for their dear little lives. Now ‘L’s’ and ‘S’s’ are both common as double terminal letters; but here the S’s make sense, and the L’s would not. The word of course is _kindness_.

Two more new letters? Why, we are getting on. Down they go.

It isn’t difficult now to guess the words _love_ and _above_, and we have _Eden_ and _sand_ and _this_ clear above us. We see, too, in the verses four words of the same two Fays each. The first Fay is O, so the second must be F, because it is not N nor H.

Now I’ll go no farther with you in the language of the Restless Fays. It would only be insulting my readers if I expressed a doubt of their being able to puzzle out the absent letters in the other words, ‘. o. l d’ you would readily guess would be ‘_world_,’ and that would supply you with an ‘R’ for the second word of the second line, namely, ‘r a i n s’--‘grains,’ of course. And so you quickly finish the cipher:--

‘Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the beauteous land.

‘Little acts of kindness,
Little deeds of love,
Make this world an Eden,
Like the Heaven above.’

Though, by the way, the printers have accidentally dropped the final letter in ‘Heaven.’

You will now understand that simple ciphers can with a little experience be easily read. Just try your ingenuity on the first one you find in any daily newspaper.

Here, by the way, is a kind of cryptogram which is difficult to decipher, and in which you might write to a friend through the public prints with comparative safety. The key to it is a rectangular triangle, and you write the word you want to transpose from A to B (_vide_ figure subjoined), the transposed word will be found at A--C. Thus, suppose we wanted to write the following sentence, which you will perceive contains nothing but the truth:--‘THE BOY’S OWN PAPER is the best magazine of its kind, and we all dearly love it.’ Well, take your first word, ‘The,’ and arrange it in a triangle, filling it with the letters which follow naturally in the Alphabet, thus:--

T
H I
E F G

The word ‘The’ thus cryptogramised becomes ‘T I G.’ Now let us form a few of the other words in triangles, all in a row to save space:--

B O P I T B M
O P W X A B S T H I E F A B
Y Z A N O P P Q R E F G S T U G H I
S T U V E F G H T U V W A B C D
R S T U V Z A B C D
I K L M N O
N O P Q R S T
E F G H I K L M

and so on, and we would thus find that our little cipher would read thus:--‘Tig Bpav Oxp Pbrhv it tig bfuw mbiddotm,’ &c.

Now there are two things to which I wish to call your attention in this cipher: first, the primary letter of the transposed word is the same in every case as the original; and secondly, the letters are different in each word. Just observe that the ‘T’ in the word ‘The’ remains a ‘T,’ but in the word ‘Best’ it becomes a ‘W.’ The ‘I’ in the word ‘Is’ remains an ‘I,’ but in the word ‘Magazine’ it becomes an ‘O.’ In the latter word the first ‘A’ becomes ‘B,’ and the second ‘D,’ and ‘Z’ is also ‘D.’

In conclusion, let me just add that I consider cipher-reading one of the best mental exercises that any boy could indulge in.