"Now we must see what would be the effect of that, Axel; put down upon this paper any sentence you like, only instead of arranging the letters in the usual way, one after the other, place them in succession in vertical columns, so as to group them together in five or six vertical lines."
I caught his meaning, and immediately produced the following literary wonder:
I y l o a u l o l w r b o u , n G e v w m d r n e e y e a !
"Good," said the professor, without reading them, "now set down those words in a horizontal line."
I obeyed, and with this result:
Iyloau lolwrb ou,nGe vwmdrn eeyea!
"Excellent!" said my uncle, taking the paper hastily out of my hands. "This begins to look just like an ancient document: the vowels and the consonants are grouped together in equal disorder; there are even capitals in the middle of words, and commas too, just as in Saknussemm's parchment."
I considered these remarks very clever.
"Now," said my uncle, looking straight at me, "to read the sentence which you have just written, and with which I am wholly unacquainted, I shall only have to take the first letter of each word, then the second, the third, and so forth."
And my uncle, to his great astonishment, and my much greater, read: