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 |