First, one of these three symbols, the V, is a repetition of one of those we have already shown to be s, t, f, or n.  Of the remaining two, [-] <, one must be a vowel, that is, it must be either u, e, o, u, or y; i being already determined upon.  Now how many [-]’s and ’s do we find in the collection before us?  Ten or more of the first, and six, or about six, of the latter.  Recalling the table made out by Poe—­a table I once learned as a necessary part of my schooling as a cipher interpreter—­I ran over it thus:  e is the one letter most in use in English.  Afterward the succession runs thus a, o, i d, h, n, r, etc.  There being then ten [-]’s to six ’s [-] must be a vowel, and in all probability the vowel e, as no other character in the whole collection, save the plentiful squares, is repeated so often.

I am a patient woman usually, but I was nervous that night, and, perhaps, too deeply interested in the outcome to do myself justice.  I could think of no word with a for one of its three letters which would make sense when added on to It is, Is it, I f it, Is in.

Conscious of no mistake, yet always alive to the possibility of one, I dropped the isolated scrap I was working upon and took up the longer and fuller ones, and with them a fresh line of reasoning.  If my argument so far had been trustworthy, I should find, in these other specimens, a double [-][-] standing for the double e so frequently found in English.  Did I find such?  No.  Another shock to my theory.

Should I, then, give it up?  Not while another means of verification remained.  The word the should occur more than once in a collection of words as long as the one before me.  If U is really e, I should find it at the end of the supposed thes.  Do I so find it?  There are several words scattered through the whole, of only three letters.  Are any of them terminated by U?  Not one.  My theory is false, then, and I must begin all over.

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.