Tombstone epitaph., 1915-10-31

had been written lown "Di Giovanni instead of "Di Sa Giovanni"
 Half a minute. and would have in serted the San.' admitted Della Cam pagna ruefuily. But you know I am poor at English. in spite of five years at St. James, and there wasn't time The marchese was privy to the whole thing, you scoundrel," shouted fiercely.
 He smiled and shrugged his shoul ders. There was no getting around that affectation of naive simplicity.
 Well, my friend" 1 said. 'T have studied the cipher in a hundred ways and I can't find in that any declara ton of Italy's neutrality. Of course started by presuming that the letter appearing most frequently stood for e. But that carried me nowhere, Now, if it is . code cipher, all I can say is you have refined the code to a degree unknown among other nations Besides. what code would haye'Cher- nagara' in it, or the name of the mar | chese?"
 | SaihPdkhd uoW II DcSluc iAc and drew a pad from his pocket. He placed it on his knee and took out a pencil.
 "The essence of all codes Is that they must be undecipherable without | key" he said. No code has ever been invented which cannot be de- coded. unless the letters are inter. changeable. The key gives the order of change. Our key is-or was, rather the day of the month. This being the fourth day of August. the key to all code messages sent on that day l was 4
 Now We have to consider another factor. The body or the message con tains twenty-six words, but by reading one hundred thousand instead of 100000, as this system demands. al. | though in decoding we adhere to the exact form of the message. we get 2s words. Twenty eight words, then. make up the message. sans signature and phraseology.
 We have now the two numbers. 2s and {. Add to 2 and we get 6. Add to and we get l2. or 2 beyond the ten. Tn place of 2s. therefore, we have a new number. 62. The sixth let. ter of the telegram forms the first let ter of the real message The second letter forms the second letter.
 Take our number e and repeat the process, which gives us 10 and 6. The tenth letter following. therefore. forms the third letter of the real message The sixth letter after that forms the fourth letter.
 Repeating the process still once more, we take our number 106. by add ing to each portion we get 1 and 10. Now. my friend. observe how it works out in practice"
 Figuring upon his pad. he wrote iown the following series of numbers:
 6, ?, 10, $, 1. 10, s. f. 2. 8. 6. 2, 10, 6, 4. 10. 8. f, ?, 8, 6. ?, 10, 6, 4, 10, s, 4, 2.
 Al even numbers. you see," Della Campagna continued. "On odd days of the month, of course. the figures are odd. You will observe that We have a complete cycle of ten numbers before the process repeats itself In other words, where one might decodi' fy the code had We fixed values for the letters. he now finds himself under the necessity of decodifying a code in which each letter may stand for any other, and may be from two to ten spaces apart from its neighbor on eith- CT hand It is a good system. and far better than a code book. which always gets stolen in the end"
 Resuming his pencil. Della Cam pagna wrote out the telegraphed mes sage again. dividing it. not between the words. but after each series of let ters corresponding to the series of fig ures. and capitalizing the end letters instead of those at the beginning of the words. The message now read as follows:
 placeI nT he ChernagA ravauL, tslI ras l00,000A tparparI souR OR der andwE demanD bE promptlyeN teredT ohhA ccountandB ecreditE dalL low aneeU nderhM sI gnaturediG iovanN ibyO urroyalwaR rantithA ugiT ".
 What do you make out of that?" inquired Della Campagna, handing the pad to me with smile. Pretty good English for an Italian, even if l did spend five years as an attache at the Court of St. James-don't you think so?"
 put the capital letters together and found the following line upon my pad:
 ITALIAIRREDENTABELLUMIGNOR
 ATV
 stared at it in perplexity. It seemed strangely familiar to me; yet for the life of me I could not make it out, or think of any word ending in the letter V.
 Surely. my dear friend, you have not forgotten your Latin?" Della Campagna demanded.
 And then the puzzle existed no longer. Mechanically my eye sorted out the words:
 ITALIA IRREDENTA BELLUM IGNORAT. V.
 "The V at the end stands for Vic fors If fs customary fin sending a