nd, at
present unknown.

Now what conclusions could I draw from these? I shall give them to you
as they came to me that night. Others with wits superior to my own may
draw additional and more suggestive ones:

First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made in
some other way than by breaks.

Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No. 1 meant
nothing--that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or
non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.

Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of the
first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing for the
same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or phrase as a
complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and always to her
dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all but the simple one
with which she had started.

Fourth: No. 1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in
itself.

Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its
proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading fell.

Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape or
nature.

Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.

Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show the
first one to be a word of one letter. There are but two words in the
English language of one letter--a and i--and in the specimens before
me but one character, that of [], which shows shading, next to another
shaded character.

Ninth: [] was therefore a or i

A decided start.

All this, of course, was simply preliminary.

The real task still lay before me. It was to solve the meaning of
those first seven characters, which, if my theory were correct, was a
communication in itself, and one of such importance that, once mastered,
it would give the key to the whole situation.

[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;

or with the shading (same in bold - transcriber)

[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;

You have all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by
which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a
fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet.

Let us see if it applies to this one.

There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Are there
twenty-six or nearly twenty-six different characters, in the one hundred
and one I find inscribed on the various slips spread out before m