Note * — THIEVES' WIT

For the benefit of those of curious minds I will give the key to the cryptogram. The simplest form of this kind of puzzle is that in which every letter has a certain other letter to stand for it. It may be the one before it, the one after it, or a purely arbitrary substitution. In any case the same letter always has the same alias. That is child's play to solve. I soon discovered that I was faced by something more complex. Observe that in one place "night" appears as EA&BO, whereas in the next line it is FBACP. "Company" masqueraded in this extraordinary form: &MW&M&L. Here was a jawbreaker! To make a long story short I discovered after hundreds of experiments that the first letter of the first word of each sentence was ten letters in advance of the one set down; the second letter eleven letters ahead, and so on up to twenty-five, then begin over from ten. With each sentence however short the writer began afresh from ten. He added to the complications by including the character & as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. The fragmentary sentence at the top of the page held me up for a long time until I discovered that the first letter was twenty-three numbers in advance of the right one. Several mistakes on the part of the writer added to my difficulties.