And so on, page after page. Theoretically, this vest pocket volume is a valuable helpmate, but when Mr. Peasley wanted to cable Iowa to have his Masonic dues paid and let Bill Levison take the river farm for another year and try to collect the money from Joe Spillers, the code book did not seem to have the proper equivalents.
We had with us on the boat an American who carried a very elaborate code book. All the way up from Plymouth to London he was working on a cablegram to his wife. When he turned it over to the operator, this is the joyous message that went singing through the water back to New York:
"LIZCAM, New York. Hobgoblin buckwheat explosion manifold cranberry suspicious.
"JAMES."
He showed us a copy and seemed to be very proud of it.
"That's what you save by having a code," he explained.
"What will Lizcam think when he receives that?"
"He? That's my wife's registered cable address. 'Liz' for Lizzie and 'Cam' for Campbell. Her maiden name was Lizzie Campbell."
"Well, what does that mean about a buckwheat hobgoblin having a suspicious explosion?"
"Oh, those words are selected arbitrarily to represent full sentences in the code. When my wife gets that cable she will look up those words one after the other and elaborate the message so that it will read like this: