‘Well, it’s too late to change that. He was born—I could see by looking, but it really doesn’t matter, does it? He was born somewhere in sixteen hundred and something or other, and I forget what his father was.’
‘I must try to remember what you tell me.’
‘Well, it all amounts to this, that he got on very well in the world, that he became at last a high official of the navy in the time of Charles the Second, and that he died in fairly good circumstances, and left his library, which was a fine one, to one of the universities, I can’t remember which.’
‘There is an accuracy about your information, Frank—’
‘I know, dear, but it really does not matter. All this has nothing to do with the main question.’
‘Go on, then!’
‘Well, this library was left as a kind of dust-catcher, as such libraries are, until one day, more than a hundred years after the old boy’s death, some enterprising person seems to have examined his books, and he found a number of volumes of writing which were all in cipher, so that no one could make head or tail of them.’
‘Dear me, how very interesting!’
‘Yes, it naturally excited curiosity. Why should a man write volumes of cipher? Imagine the labour of it! So some one set to work to solve the cipher. This was about the year 1820. After three years they succeeded.’
‘How in the world did they do it?’