“I’ve learnt to mistrust guesswork,” he said. “It would be a jump at random to come to the conclusion that the cryptogram had been drawn on the fly-leaf of a Bible because it contained some Scripture texts. There is no connection between the facts. In fact, it seemed unlikely to me at first that a religious man like the old farmer would have mutilated his family Bible for such a purpose. I was inclined to the view that he had taken a fly-leaf from one of his Leisure Hour bound volumes, which at the farm range from 1860 to the early seventies—a period of years when this kind of glossy thick paper was much used for fly-leaves by English printers. But while I was examining the sheet through the magnifying glass I detected this mark on the edge, which proved conclusively to me that the cryptogram had been drawn on the fly-leaf of the family Bible. Have a look at it through the glass—you cannot detect it with the naked eye.”
Crewe held the sheet edgeways as he spoke, and pointed to one of the outer corners. Marsland gazed intently through the glass, and was able to detect a minute glittering spot not much larger than a pin’s point.
“I see it,” he said, relinquishing the glass. “But I do not understand what it means.”
“It is Dutch metal or gold-leaf. The book from which this sheet was cut was gilt-edged. That disposes of the volumes of Leisure Hour and other bound periodicals, none of which is gilt-edged. When I was looking at the books at the farm I noticed only two with gilt-edged leaves. One was the big family Bible, and the other was a large, old fashioned Language of Flowers. But this sheet could not have been cut from The Language of Flowers.”
“Why not?”
“Because it has two rounded corners. As a rule, only sacred books and poetry are bound with rounded corners. In any case, I remember that The Language of Flowers at the farm is square-edged. Therefore the sheet on which the cryptogram has been drawn was cut from the Bible.
“The next question that faced me was how the numbers had been used: they did not represent the numbers of the pages, I was sure of that. The Bible is a book in which figures are used freely in the arrangement of the contents. The pages are numbered, the chapters are divided into verses which are numbered, and there is a numbered table of contents at the beginning of each chapter. Obviously, the Bible is an excellent book from which to devise a cryptogram of numbers owing to the multiplicity of figures used in it and the variety of ways in which they are arranged. I found both a Bible and Prayer Book in the bookshelves, here, and set to work to study the numerical arrangement of the chapters, the divisions of the verses, and the arrangement of figures at the head of the chapters.”
“It was while I was thus engaged that I remembered that at the beginning of the authorised version of the Bible is inserted a table of the books of the Old and New Testaments, the pages on which they begin, and the number of chapters in each. Here was the possibility of a starting-point, sufficiently unusual to make a good concealment, yet not too remote. I turned to the table, and, on running my eye down it, I saw that the Psalms, and the Psalms alone, contain 150 chapters. Now, the first line of central figures in the cryptogram is 150. I was really fortunate in starting off with this discovery, because otherwise I might have been led off the track by the doubling and trebling of the 3 in the second line of central figures, and have wasted time trying to fathom some mystic interpretation of the 9—a numeral which has always had a special significance for humanity: the Nine Muses, the Nine Worthies, ‘dressed up to the nines,’ and so on. But with 150 as the indication that the cryptogram had been composed from the Book of Psalms, it was obvious that the next line of numerals in the centre directed attention to some particular portion of them. As there are not 396 verses in any chapter of the Psalms——”
“Just what I was going to point out,” broke in Marsland.
“Quite so. But it was possible that 396 meant Psalm 39, 6. Therefore I turned to the thirty-ninth Psalm. Verse six of that Psalm reads: