CHAPTER III

You know now the beginning of the Alphabet, the careful way it was planned and made, and how finally after so many years it has come to be used in the form in which we have it today. Do you remember that when Albert Dürer made his Alphabet of Roman letters he made more than one form of each letter--there were three _A_'s, for example. Would you like to know why he did this? Plate IX shows you two other kinds of Alphabets made long ago by a Spanish artist, Francisco Lucas. Look at the Italic capital letters in the upper part of this Plate. You can easily see that there are two different forms of the same letters, can you not? But now look at the small letters. You still see that there are two examples of each letter, but they are so much alike that you will have to look very carefully to see the difference between the two forms. Why do you suppose this artist went to the trouble to make these letters so much alike, and yet different? Do you not think that this would be a very strange thing to do unless there was a good reason for it? Look at the lower part of the Plate and you will see that there are two different forms of the small Roman letters also. Now turn back to Lesson XV. You see that by using a capital letter for the _a_ form and a small letter for the _b_ form you were able to hide within the phrase "_Biliteral Cipher_" the word, "_key_." You can easily see that this would not be a good way to hide a secret, for the difference between the large and small letters is not only easy to see, but looks so strange that it is the first thing you notice. Now suppose that instead of using a capital letter for the _a_ form and a small letter for the _b_ form you use for each letter of the Alphabet, both capital and small, two forms which were very much alike but still were different. In the following line--

you see the same phrase "_Biliteral Cipher_," but it does not look strange to you, does it? Still, if you will study it carefully you will see that the first _i_ is different from the second, and that the first _l_ in "_Biliteral_" is different from the second _l_. You have guessed by this time that the phrase "_Biliteral Cipher_," as it stands here, also contains a hidden word. The word is "_the_." This phrase was made to contain the word "_the_" by using the two forms of letters which you see in the upper part of Plate IX and which were called "_doubles_" by the printers who used them several hundred years ago. Now do you begin to see how important these two forms are?

Look again at the little Shakespeare poem in the Italic alphabet on Plate VIII. Now that you know about _doubles_ you can see, if you have learned to use your eyes, that we have hidden a secret within this poem too. Would you like to know what it is? We will help you to work it out by giving you what is called a _Classifier_ which will make it easy to _decipher_ the verse. On this Classifier, which you will find on Plate X, the very same Italic letters that you saw in Plate IX have been arranged so that all the _a_ form letters are above the shaded part and all the _b_ form letters below. Now if you will tear out this whole page and carefully cut out these shaded parts you can place this page over the lines of the poem in italic letters. This will help you to decide to which form the letters of the poem belong. Place the Classifier over the poem so that the first letter, the capital =H= of _Have_, is between the _a_ form and the _b_ form capital =H= on the Classifier. You will see that this capital =H= of _Have_ is the _a_ form. Now below the Classifier has been placed something which will help you still more. All the words of the poem have been divided and have been placed into groups of five letters. As we decided that the =H= of _Have_ belongs to the _a_ form, we have placed an _a_ beneath the =H= in the first group of five letters. Now move the Classifier so that the =a= in _Have_ comes between the _a_ form =a= and the _b_ form =a= on the Classifier. You will see that this letter also belongs to the _a_ form. If you will do the same to the rest of the letters of this first group you will find that they are all _a_ form letters. Now what letter of the Alphabet does a group of five _a_'s stand for?--=A=, does it not? So the first letter in our secret is =A=. Now place the Classifier over the rest of the letters of the poem and see to what form they belong, just as we have done for you in the first group. If you do your work carefully you will find the hidden secret.

If we can hide one word in "_Biliteral Cipher_" and a sentence in a short poem, do you not see how a whole story could be hidden so carefully within a book that it might not be discovered for many, many years?

Helen Louise Ricketts

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ciphers For the Little Folks, by Dorothy Crain