Cenerentola, until my heart is sick have I tried to frame an explanation for you, but cannot. Silence is safest, if the true cause is not suspected; if it is, all stories will be sifted to the bottom. Do you remember our cousin’s first proposition?—think of it.

The following, which appeared on the 19th of the same month, is written in plain language, and is evidently a specimen of the marplot advertisement before alluded to:—

Cenerentola, what nonsense! Your cousin’s proposition is absurd. I have given an explanation—the true one—which has perfectly satisfied both parties—a thing which silence never could have effected. So no more such absurdity.

The secret of this cipher consisted in representing each letter by the twenty-second onward continually. One more specimen of these singular advertisements and we have done. On Feb. 20, 1852, there appeared in the Times the following mysterious line:—

Tig tjohw it tig jfhiirvola og tig psgvw.—F. D. N.

The general reader, doubtless, looked upon this jumble of letters with some such a puzzled air as the mastiff gives the tortoise in a very popular French bronze; but not being able to make anything out of it, passed on to the more intelligible contents of the paper. A friend of ours, however, was curious and intelligent enough to extract the plain English out of it, though not without much trouble, as thus:—If we take the first word of the sentence, Tig, and place under its second letter i the one which alphabetically precedes it, and treat the next letters in a similar manner, we shall have the following combination:—

T i g
h f
e

Reading the first letters obliquely we have the article “The;” if we treat the second word in the same manner, the following will be the result:—

T j o h w
i. n. g. v.
m. f. u.
e. t.
s.

which, read in the same slanting way, produces the word Times, and the whole sentence, thus ingeniously worked out, gives up its latent and extraordinary meaning, thus—