The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-04-15

lne. BIRMINGHAM AGE-HE kcyword he worked on before we can mak, use of it," said Crewe. "Once we get tht keyword we will have no trouble in de ciphering the mysterious message. The keyword is the real difficulty of ciphers o. this kind. It is like the keyword of a com bination lock. Without it, you cannot un lock the cipher. It is absolutely insolublc Suppose, for example, he had picked ; word at random out of the dictionary, ant died without divulging it to anybody, wt should have to go through the dictionar, word for word, working the table on eacf word, till we came to the right one.'
 "But that would take years," exclaimed Marsland Nankly.
 "Unless we hit on it by a lucky ac cident That is why the keyword cipher is practically insoluble without knowledss of the keyword. It is not even ncccssar, to have word. A prearranged code 0. letters will do, known only to the com poser of the cryptogram. If he wanted anybody else to decipher his cryptogram the form of table he worked on, but tn, code of letters forming the keyword."
 Well, I do not see we are much furthe forward,' Said Marsland despondently. 70 course, it's very clever of you to hay, found out what you have, but we are help less without the keyword. The old man i not likely to have divulged it to anybody
 "You are wrong," said Crewe. "He ha divulged it."
 'tTo whom?''
 ''To this paper. As have said before, ht did not want his cryptogram to be insol uble; he wanted his heirs to have his money but he did not want it found very easily You have forgotten the texts at the bot tom of the paper. They have not beer placed there for nothing. The keyword i hidden in then1.'
 q forgot all about the texts-I was SC interested in your reconstruction of tht cryptogram," said Marsland. "As you say he didn't put the texts there for nothing so it seems likely that he has hidden the keyword in them. But even now we ma, have some difficulty in finding it. Do you propose to take the texts word fol word, testing each with the table, till vol find the right one?"
 "That would take long while," sait Crewe. ~"I hope to simplify the process con siderably. In fact, I think I have alread. discovered the keyword."
 "You have!' exclaimed Marsland, in as tonishment. "How have you managed that?'
 "By deduction from the facts in front o1 us-or perhaps I should say by reflectine on the hints placed in the texts. Ism there something about those texts tha strikes you as peculiar?"
 Marsland examined them attentively fol some time, and shook his head.
 "I'm afraid Pm not sufficiently we'll ul in the Scriptures to notice anything pc culiar about them. I should say they were from the Old Testament, but I couldn' tell you what part of it."
 ssThe texts are from the Old Testament from Jeremiah XIV and Isaiah vii. They are remarkable for the fact that they repre- sent two passages--the only two instances cryptograms to hide their actual meaning In the first instance the prophet, Jere miah, living in dangerous times, vels his attack on the King of Babylon by writing Sheshak for Babel-Babylon, that is, in stead of using L, the second and twelfth letters of the Hebrew alphabet, from tht beginning, he wrote Sh Sh K from the enc "a simple form of cryptogram which i fro Ivy T,, @Ia