astimes. On this
occasion he sought to establish the order in which the letters were
reproduced--vowels first, consonants afterward.

Three hours had elapsed since he began. He had before his eyes an
alphabet which, if his procedure were right, would give him the right
meaning of the letters in the document. He had only to successively
apply the letters of his alphabet to those of his paragraph. But before
making this application some slight emotion seized upon the judge. He
fully experienced the intellectual gratification--much greater than,
perhaps, would be thought--of the man who, after hours of obstinate
endeavor, saw the impatiently sought-for sense of the logogryph coming
into view.

"Now let us try," he said; "and I shall be very much surprised if I have
not got the solution of the enigma!"

Judge Jarriquez took off his spectacles and wiped the glasses; then he
put them back again and bent over the table. His special alphabet was in
one hand, the cryptogram in the other. He commenced to write under the
first line of the paragraph the true letters, which, according to him,
ought to correspond exactly with each of the cryptographic letters. As
with the first line so did he with the second, and the third, and the
fourth, until he reached the end of the paragraph.

Oddity as he was, he did not stop to see as he wrote if the assemblage
of letters made intelligible words. No; during the first stage his
mind refused all verification of that sort. What he desired was to give
himself the ecstasy of reading it all straight off at once.

And now he had done.

"Let us read!" he exclaimed.

And he read. Good heavens! what cacophony! The lines he had formed with
the letters of his alphabet had no more sense in them that those of
the document! It was another series of letters, and that was all.
They formed no word; they had no value. In short, they were just as
hieroglyphic.

"Confound the thing!" exclaimed Judge Jarriquez.

CHAPTER XIII. IS IT A MATTER OF FIGURES?

IT WAS SEVEN o'clock in the evening. Judge Jarriquez had all the time
been absorbed in working at the puzzle--and was no further advanced--and
had forgotten the time of repast and the time of repose, when there came
a knock at his study door.

It was time. An hour later, and all the cerebral substance of the vexed
magistrate would certainly have evaporated under the intense heat into
which he had worked his head.

At the order to enter--which