Now, as the match burnt up, by some curious chance, connected probably with the darkness and the sudden striking of light upon his eyeballs, it came to pass that Harold, happening to glance thereon, was only able to read four letters of this first line of writing. All the rest seemed to him but as a blur connecting those four letters. They were:
D...............E...............a...............d
being respectively the initials of the first, the sixth, the eleventh, and the sixteenth words of the line given above.
The match burnt out, and he began to hunt about for another.
“D-E-A-D,” he said aloud, repeating the letters almost automatically. “Why it spells ‘Dead.’ That is rather curious.”
Something about this accidental spelling awakened his interest very sharply—it was an odd coincidence. He lit some candles, and hurriedly examined the line. The first thing which struck him was that the four letters which went to make up the word “dead” were about equi-distant in the line of writing. Could it be? He hurriedly counted the words in the line. There were sixteen of them. That is after the first, one of the letters occurred at the commencement of every fifth word.
This was certainly curious. Trembling with nervousness he took a pencil and wrote down the initial letter of every fifth word in the message, thus:
Do not grieve for me, Edward my son, that I am thus suddenly and
D E a
wickedly done to death by rebel murderers, for naught happeneth
d m
but according to God’s will. And now farewell, Edward, till we
a n
shall meet in heaven. My moneys have I hid, and on account thereof
s m o
I die unto this world, knowing that not one piece shall Cromwell
u n
touch. To whom God shall appoint shall all my treasure be, for
t a b
nought can I communicate.
c
When he had done he wrote these initials in a line:
DEadmansmountabc