"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beg the favor of you to have delivered him. I have written to Mr. Adams on the subject of directing him to settle with Mr. Barclay, and attend his answer. In the mean time, I am not without hopes Mr. Barclay has done the business. I send also a note desiring Mr. Lambe to deliver you his cipher: and a copy of a letter from the minister of finance here to me, announcing several regulations in favor of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... least of the claims of our friend to reverence was the strange line of hieroglyph he left on the tabula rasa sea-washed, in column like the message written down an obelisk; and that the most high priest had no key to the cipher only made it more curious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... keepers of some of the communal forests in Switzerland are provided with small axes, having the back of the axe-head worked into a large and sharp die, the impression of the die being some letter or cipher indicating the commune. When these foresters wish to mark a tree, they give it first a slice with the edge of the axe, and then (turning the axe) they deal it a heavy blow with the back of the axe-head. By the first operation they ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... staff in use among the Lacedaemonians for writing cipher despatches. A strip of leather or paper was wound round the 'skytal,' on which the required message was written lengthwise, so that when unrolled it became unintelligible; the recipient abroad had a staff of the same thickness and pattern, and so was enabled by ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... hour I began to feel confoundedly uncomfortable. I was a mere cipher in the room; and what with the appalling bulk of Mr. Tims, the attention the ladies bestowed upon him, and the neglect with which they treated me, I sunk considerably in my own estimation. In proportion as this feeling took possession of me, I experienced an involuntary respect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... get right ideas of their religious duty. Even after this aim was outgrown, our schools for generations did little more than to teach the use of the mere tools of knowledge; to read, to write, and to cipher were the great gains of the schoolroom. Even geography and grammar were rather late arrivals. Then came the idea that the school should train children for citizenship, and it was argued that the chief reason why schools should be supported at public expense was in order that good ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... about to visit Cuba, to investigate, and, later, to deny the truth of the disgraceful libels published concerning the Spanish officials on the island by the papers of the United States. At the same time he cabled in cipher to the captain-general in Havana to see that the distinguished statesman was closely spied upon from the moment of his arrival until his departure, and to place on the "suspect" list all Americans and Cubans who ventured ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... in shape nearly triangular, shut in by a panel in front, which, thrown back, and supported by two long brass hinges, could be used as a writing-desk. In the middle of the panel, inlaid with different-colored wood, Rudolph noticed a cipher in ebony, an M. and R. interlaced, and surmounted by the coronet of a count. He imagined its last possessor to belong to an elevated class of society. His curiosity increased; he examined the secretary with renewed attention; he opened mechanically the drawers, one after the other, when, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... heir to the throne, and had in consequence been raised to the rank of Western Empress, subordinate only to the childless Eastern Empress. Of the latter, there is nothing to be said, except that she remained a cipher to the end of her life; of the concubine, a great deal has been said, much of which is untrue. Taken from an ordinary Manchu family into the palace, she soon gained an extraordinary influence over Hsien Feng, and began ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... a struggle 'twixt love and duty. No, not duty: I might have sheathed my sword, and wronged no one; I was but a cipher among thousands, whose blade would scarcely have been missed. Nor would I have wronged myself. I was simply, as I have already declared, an adventurer. The country for which I fought could not claim me; I was bound by no political conscience, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... before one of the long windows in the conservatory, listlessly watching the people in the square. And these poor fools envied her! To envy her, who was a prisoner, a chattel to be exchanged for war's immunity, who was a princess in name but a cipher in fact! All was wrong with the world. She had stolen out of the ball-room; the craving to be alone had been too strong. Little she cared whether they missed her or not. She left the window and sat on one of the divans, idly ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... a long time and great batin' about the bush, that the ould count came in; but the sight of a sacret cipher did the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... nothing to do, and writing is plaguy apt to bring a man to states-prison, particularly if he writes his name so like another man as to have it mistaken for his'n. Cyphering is the thing—if a man knows how to cipher, he is sure to grow rich. We are a 'calculating' people, we ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... to the message, but it might mean a good deal to us if we had no other means of discovering the sender. You see that he has begun by writing "The...game...is," and so on. Afterwards he had, to fulfill the prearranged cipher, to fill in any two words in each space. He would naturally use the first words which came to his mind, and if there were so many which referred to sport among them, you may be tolerably sure that he is either an ardent shot or interested in breeding. ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read, to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can serve ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "I used them that way when I was a little girl. Bees, like pigeons, go back to their homes. Look, sir! Here, in order, are the dispatches, each traced in cipher on a tiny roll of tissue. They were tied to ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... me with a gay and genuine friendship, and as Sandy and I made our salutations to her I saw Nancy at some little distance from us, literally surrounded by fatuous cipher-faced youths, who stood in some awe before her misty beauty and reputed power. There was pride in me that the girl was mine, a pride which Sandy Carmichael shared with me, and as Hugh Pitcairn crossed the long room to salute ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... said Legrand, "the solution is by no means so difficult as you might be led to imagine from the first hasty inspection of the characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher—that is to say, they convey a meaning; but then, from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose, him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... and he depends on his own sources for information. I am here because he sent me to 'Go, look, see,' and report. I have been wiring him ever since you started from the coast, and since you became president. Your censor has very kindly allowed me to use our cipher." ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... dare dream zat I could go to my father," sighed Inez, "but perhaps you will be of so great kindness as to take him a message from me. I cannot mail it—he is not allowed to receive letters zat are not read, and we have no secret cipher we ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... give him is to say that he does his work with the sureness and accuracy of a machine. It follows that the more civilised a country becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school plays in the life of the nation,—and that not merely because the ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what life will not do for him in his manhood, or will ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... less than the munificent sum of threepence-halfpenny per day! With such machinery we may feel it was an achievement to be grateful for, if by the end of the winter's session the children had learnt to read, write, and cipher moderately, and could repeat by heart a prayer for morning and evening, the Lord's Prayer, the ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... subject, from the conception and the myth, the necessary cycle is accomplished in regular phases, wherever the ethnic temperament and capacity and extrinsic circumstances permit it, until the rational idea is reached, the sign or cipher which becomes the powerful instrument of the exercise and generalization of thought. In order to show the efficacy of the mythical and scientific faculty of thought comprised in the systems of ancient and modern ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of money advocated in a former number of this Journal.[2] If a parcel of goods weighs 13 cwt., 7 stone, 8 lbs., and it be desired to know how many pounds it contains, it is unnecessary to change a single figure to shew that there are 1378; an additional cipher gives the number of ounces (137,80); another the number of drachms (137,800), instead of requiring the present tedious process of reduction. Again: if any commodity costs, for instance, 2 fl. 3 cents per lb., we ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... in the sea, All this magnificence in Thee is lost:— What are ten thousand worlds compared to Thee? And what am I then?—Heaven's unnumbered host, Though multiplied by myriads, and arrayed In all the glory of sublimest thought, Is but an atom in the balance, weighed Against Thy greatness—is a cipher brought Against infinity! ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory of artist ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... proceeded at once to make an alliance with that city. So that up to the last moment you were in constant expectation of hearing that the whole of Boeotia was laid at the feet of Thebes. With the late incidents all is changed. You need fear Thebes no longer. One brief despatch (27) in cipher will suffice to procure a dutiful subservience to your every wish in that quarter, provided only you will take as kindly an interest in ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... please," said I. And I gave him a cipher telegram to Joe—an order to invest my store of cash, which meant practically my whole fortune, in the gilt-edged securities that were to be had for cash at a small ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... have contributed a stone to the pyramid of the national renown, that our lips have swelled the echoes of imperial glory? What can reconcile the man of powerful intellect to the consciousness that he has passed through life a cipher, and left nothing behind ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... for the first time with the local importance and solid standing of the Dorntons. All the magnates and old county families were represented. The inn yard and the streets of the little village were filled with their quaint liveries, crested paneled carriages, and silver-cipher caparisoned horses, with a sprinkling of fashion from London. He could not close his ears to the gossip of the villagers regarding the suddenness of the late baronet's death, the extinction of the title, the accession of the orphaned girl to the property, and even, to his ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... me truth to tell, To cipher and to read right well; They taught me Latin, sir, and Greek, Though even then ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Washington spent his childhood. He learned to read, write, and cipher at a small school kept by Hobby, the sexton of the parish church. Among his playmates was Richard Henry Lee, who was afterward a famous Virginian. When the boys grew up, they wrote to each other of grave matters of war and state, but here is the beginning of their correspondence, written when they ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... been to abjure Episcopacy personally), and while he refrained from committing himself to an acceptance of Presbytery for his English realm, he does not appear to have objected to the impression that on this second matter he might yield to time and reason. And so, while writing in cipher to Queen Henrietta Maria, complaining of the "juggling" of the Scots, because they would not break with the English Parliament in his behalf, and while urging the Queen in the same letters to press upon Cardinal Mazarin, and through ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... CHILTERN. [Sits down at the table and takes a pen in his hand.] Well, I shall send a cipher telegram to the Embassy at Vienna, to inquire if there is anything known against her. There may be some secret scandal she ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... confinement and labors of the school-room. He has since declared that the only books he remembers using at school were the New Testament and the spelling-book. The result was, that he merely learned to read, write, and cipher, and that imperfectly. He was passionately fond of the water, and was never so well pleased as when his father allowed him to assist in sailing his boat. He was also a famous horseman from his earliest childhood, and even now recalls with evident ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... you prefer to use the cipher note for blackmail and to satisfy your own dirty designs for revenge when your ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... Napoleon's plans, and that he—Fouche—played the English commander false. "On the very day of Napoleon's departure from Paris," say the Memoirs, "I despatched Madame D——, furnished with notes in cipher, narrating the whole plan of the campaign. But at the same time I privately sent orders for such obstacles at the frontier, where she was to pass, that she could not reach Wellington's headquarters ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... to Snow Hill in the year of 1896, and there remained for eight years receiving instruction at the hand of a loyal band of self-sacrificing teachers, who not only taught me how to read, write and to cipher, but in addition they taught me lessons of thrift and industry which have proven to be the main saving point in ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... cart and carriage, Told of barter and of bargain, Told of human gains and losses, Scared away the beasts and birdlings, Locked and dammed and bridged the rivers, Chained the rolling streams and rivers. Schools were opened, where the people Learned to read and write and cipher. Coaches linked the growing city With the busy world around it. Youths and maidens joined in wedlock, Parents knelt at family altars, Children gamboled in the playgrounds, Cats and dogs and cows and horses, Swine ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another. I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it,—a cipher, an o! I acknowledge life at all only by an occasional convulsional cough and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me, My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... figure and his rigid bearing Let us know most clearly what is his ideal:— Confidence in self, in his lofty standing; Thereto add conceit in his own great value. Certain, he can read—yes, and write and cipher; In the almanac no star-group's a stranger. In the church he, faithful, leads the pious chorus; Drums the catechism into young ones' noddles. Disputation to him's half the joy of living; Even though he's beaten, he will not give over. Watch him, when he talks, in how learned fashion! ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... case it contributes so little to the general amusement; for really Theobald's intense flirtation with Lady Bolsover, is the flattest piece of dull indecorum that ever met my virtuous eyes. They are dull, these people—keep him from quadrupeds, and Theobald is a cipher; and Lady B. has little more than the few ideas which she gets sent over with her dresses from Paris. I know it is mauvais ton to cry them down—but I cannot help it. My sincerity will ruin ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... Willie's cipher (he liked to write as if he lived in Russia, with the postal spies after him like hawks) was no mystery to Mrs. Heth, she being, in a certain measure, its inventor. Having taken the telegraphic brevity upstairs to show to Carlisle, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... had inherited it from a race of princes. That he neglects and slights his daughter, and loves his son, is mainly because the latter will add a sort of completeness to the firm, and make it truly Dombey and Son, while the girl, for all commercial purposes, can be nothing but a cipher. And through his pride he is struck to the heart, and ruined. Mr. Carker, his confidential agent and manager, trades upon it for all vile ends, first to feather his own nest, and then to launch his patron into ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... have been manufactured for the express purpose of composing the American flag. The stars were embroidered in silver on a dark blue satin sky. On the reverse, a rich white satin lining bore Julian's cipher, surrounded with silver embroidery. . . . The children amused themselves with their presents all day. But first I took my new Milton and read aloud to them the Hymn of the Nativity, which I do every Christmas." "How easy it is," my mother writes of a Christmas-tree for poor children, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... found a new home in the old house, but under greatly changed conditions. The new mistress had notions of her own as to the amount of education necessary and the measure of service to be returned for one's keep. Jim was able to read, write, and cipher; this much was ample in the opinion of Mrs. Downey, and Jim's school days ended. The understanding that he must make himself useful quickly resulted in his transference to the stable. A garret in the barn was furnished with a bed for him, and Jim's life was soon down ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... occasional ten-pound note sent to him by devious methods, he has once or twice given me advance information which has been of value—that highest value which anticipates and prevents rather than avenges crime. I cannot doubt that, if we had the cipher, we should find that this communication is of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... beginning; the beginning of a riddle story, unlike those of other stories and of other enterprises, is not half the battle; it is next to being quite unimportant, and, moreover, it is always easy. The unexplained corpse lies weltering in its gore in the first paragraph; the inexplicable cipher presents its enigma at the turning of the opening page. The writer who is secure in the knowledge that he has got a good thing coming, and has arranged the manner and details of its coming, cannot go far wrong with his exordium; ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... lavish mode of life—a habit not uncommon in the South—had rendered it necessary, at the age of fifty, when the mind, not less than the body, requires repose rather than adventure, that he should emigrate from the place of his birth; and with resources diminished to a cipher, endeavor to break ground once more in unknown forests, and commence the toils and troubles of life anew. With an only son (the youth before us) then a mere boy, and no other family, Colonel Ralph Colleton did not hesitate ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... at the Capitol; Lovaine, Morier, Haddington, Hamilton, Kestner, Falck, G. Fitzclarence, Sir W. Gell, a little Italian servant, and Mr. Hall, Bunsen's brother-in-law. Haddington told the story of Canning's sending to Bagot a despatch in cipher, containing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... tries to learn something, though little it be, Each day of her life,—something useful, you see: And in two or three years you will find she can spell, Read, cipher, and write, and do ...
— The Nursery, March 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose—and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... heretics was accounted sufficient to implicate an Italian in the charge of heresy. Sarpi's Letters are full of matter on this point. He always used Cipher, which he frequently changed, addressed his letters under feigned names, and finally resolved on writing in his own hand to no heretic. See Lettere, vol. ii. pp. 2, 151, 242, 248, 437. See also ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... regards the schools. They don't teach enough branches, sich as botany, drawin' an' sich like. What do the childern of Glendow want with botany stuck into their brains? Let 'em learn to read, write an' cipher. Them things will pay. But as fer botany, who ever heerd of it helpin' a man to manage a farm, or a woman to sew, cook or make butter? Now, look at me, Mrs. Larkins. I never studied botany, an' behold my bizness. I don't know a bit about botany, an' here I'm runnin' fer a Councillor, ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... typical story of this period deals with a cipher message for Thomas. Mr. Edison narrates it as follows: "When I was an operator in Cincinnati working the Louisville wire nights for a time, one night a man over on the Pittsburg wire yelled out: 'D. I. cipher,' which meant ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the Rosemary, he was swearing Jubilates in the privacy of his working-den state-room, having tri-daily weather reports wired to him by way of Carbonate and Argentine station, and busying himself in the intervals with sending and receiving sundry mysterious telegrams in cipher. ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... of a widow, born under the roof of a Westmoreland farmer; almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his degrees in knowledge. Shakespeare learned little more than reading and writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master among literary men. Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... manager at first reached instinctively for his telegraphic cipher code. But he reflected that this was not code-phrasing. He read the paragraph again and was obliged to remind himself that his only daughter was already the wife of a man he knew to be in excellent health. Also he was acquainted with no ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... but this was not a very smooth start for eight in the morning. Moments of lull there were, when the telegraph called her to the front room, and Billy's young mind shifted to inquiries about the cipher alphabet. And she gained at least an hour teaching him to read various words by the sound. At dinner, too, he was refreshingly silent. But such silences are unsafe, and the weather was still bad. Four o'clock found them much where they ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... time it was the chiefs of the trust. Now for instance, they were having winter racing in New Orleans and a syndicate was laying out each day's program in advance, and its agents in all the Northern cities were "milking" the poolrooms. The word came by long-distance telephone in a cipher code, just a little while before each race; and any man who could get the secret had as good as a fortune. If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it, said the little Jew—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and make ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... insolent placard. Nay, hold! fix over it our proclamation of ten thousand florins for the heretic's head! Ten thousand? methinks that is too much now—we will alter the cipher. Meanwhile Rinaldo Orsini, Lord Senator, march thy soldiers to St. Angelo; let us see if the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... He thought of raising up a party among those youthful aspirants who had not yet been habitually depraved. He had a brother whose talent could never rise beyond a poor copyist's, and him he had the judgment, unswayed by undue partiality, to account as a cipher; but he found two of his cousins men capable of becoming ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... relate that he was about to go to the White House and hold a consultation in which Mr. Arthur and Mr. Platt were to participate, when he received a telegram in cipher from Governor Cornell which, when translated, turned out to be an urgent request that the Senator should vote to confirm Robertson; and that this was regarded as insulting, and Mr. Conkling refused to go to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... he exclaimed, "would like always to be in the same place? Such a person is a mere cipher. We establish an intellectual superiority when we show ourselves superior to place. A genuine man is always a citizen of the world. It is your vegetable man that can not go far without grumbling, finding fault with all he sees, talking of comforts ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of September. During the rest of the year, the royal family, and the most confidential of their servants, were much employed in secret correspondence with the absent princes and nobility, and with the foreign Courts. Some of these letters were in cipher, and were copied by persons who knew nothing whatever of the meaning of what they were writing. The queen wrote almost all day long, and spent a part of the nights in reading. Poor lady! ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... Here the cipher is to be read Kues, but it has not the meaning of this name merely. It is put either for the plural of Q., a Question, like D. D.'s, (read Dee-Dees,) for Doctors of Divinity; or else, more erroneously, for ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... ink was dry. The reply came by return of post: "It is almost, or quite, as good as can be. Send me another." So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison', and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master', 'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others. At length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and finally 'The Crimson Flag'. The acknowledgment of that was a postcard containing these all too-flattering ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... you have come thus early, for I want a trusty man to go forthwith into the west country. What I wish you to do cannot be written, but you will take this ring;" and he took one from the little finger of his right hand, on the gem of which his cipher was graven, and gave it to my grandfather. "On showing it to Lord Boyd, whom you will find at the Dean Castle, near Kilmarnock, he will thereby know that you are specially trusted of me. The message whereof you are the bearer is to this effect,—That the Lords ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... that "he never received from Paris a single proof which could enlighten him." On the other hand, he did receive abundant enlightenment about the "sure source": the Russian Minister needed to send a cipher message to the American Embassy at Constantinople which was entrusted with Russian interests, and, the Hellenic Government readily agreeing to transmit it through its Legation at Pera, Prince Demidoff, with the consent of his Entente colleagues, proceeded to make use of the Athens wireless for ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... you, is the noblest of all professions. It contains many learned and able men who devote their lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he transparent as glass and lit up by electricity. There are doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... any article it contained. He got salt meat, corn meal, sugar, coffee, molasses, vinegar, tobacco, and coarse clothing for himself and family. An account was kept by "a young white man," and at the end of the season "a reckoning" was had. Unable to read or cipher, the poor, credulous, unsuspecting Negroes always found themselves in debt from $50 to $200! This necessitated another year's engagement; and so on for an indefinite period. There was nothing to encourage the Negroes; nothing to inspire them with hope for the future; nothing for their families ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... the French Republic. He had never even thought of lifting our beloved Paris up again, bowed down as she was under the weight of so many ruins. He had been succeeded by MacMahon, a good, brave man, but a cipher. Grevy had succeeded the Marshal, but he was miserly, and considered all outlay unnecessary for himself, for other people, and for the country. And so Paris remained sad, nursing the leprosy that the Commune ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... wrathfully. "What are you to her? Do you suppose she takes you for a symbol? I wish to Heaven she did. A round cipher of naught, the symbol of inanity. She takes you for an honourable gentleman. I've known the child since she was born. As good a little girl as you could wish ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... that I winced. He meant no harm, I suppose, but I'm bound to say that this tactless speech nettled me not a little. People are always nettling me like that. Giving me to understand, I mean to say, that in their opinion Bertram Wooster is a mere cipher and that the only member of the household with brains and ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... of crucial importance to Mrs. Gallup and the believers in the cipher wherein Bacon maintains that he is the legal son of a wedding between Dudley and the Queen. Was there such a marriage or even betrothal? Froude cautiously says that this was averted 'SEEMINGLY on Lord ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... this morning, by a mysterious messenger, a curious document; it looks like a series of carriage-wheels, but it is a cipher from Prince Metternich, who is in Bordeaux, and is dated the 1st of May. It took me a long time to puzzle it out: "Vous conseille de partir; pire viendra. Pauline a Vienne; ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... saw the crown and anchor, and his majesty's cipher on the appointments of the dead officer, he became convinced of our quality, and changed his tone—"Es verdat, son de la marina Englesa;" "But gentlemen, were there not three persons in the hut?" There were indeed—the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... satirical smile overspread his face, and gave such meaning to his words that the other heirs began to feel that Massin had let Bongrand deceive him. The tax-collector, a fat little man, as insignificant as a tax-collector should be, and as much of a cipher as a clever woman could wish, hereupon annihilated his co-heir, Massin, with the words:—"Didn't ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... the King agreed to send for Lord Wilmington, and to place him at the head of the ministry. It is remarkable that this man, who was a mere cipher, should have been again had recourse to, after his failure in making a government at the very commencement of the reign of George the Second, when his manifest incapacity, and the influence of Queen Caroline, had occasioned the remaining of his opponent ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... write to men of means of their acquaintance, informing them in some cipher or slang phrase that they have a new importation in their house awaiting eligible disposition. Large sums are often paid under such circumstances, and the fresh importation is usually sold in this way five or six times. In other words, she is represented as a maid and imposed upon men as ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... more properly speaking, his platform, and he seated himself, with a look of perplexity on his face and a remarkably small piece of lead-pencil in his mouth, to figure up the grand total of inches. He could multiply the cipher easily enough, for he was positive that the answer would be the same, however large the multiplier might be; but the question of how much eight times three was troubled ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... of pictures were lying about in disorder: with them were mingled furniture, and books with the cipher of the former owner, who never was moved by any laudable desire to glance into them. Chinese vases, marble slabs for tables, old and new furniture with curving lines, with griffins, sphinxes, and lions' paws, gilded and ungilded, chandeliers, sconces, all were heaped together ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... his work was done, he would bend his huge six-foot-four frame close down by the firelight to write and cipher ON THE BACK OF A ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... grimly and silently to the end that he might cast out of his heart, for all time, the love for a woman which had crept in. Sleep had dared not come within range of that titanic struggle. Worn with the battle which had witnessed his defeat, he had just completed his cipher message, when, following a modest knock at the door, Josef entered complacently with the pent-browed peasant at ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... with the legation of the United States in Madrid was conducted in cipher and by cable, and needs the verification of the actual text of the correspondence. It has seemed to me to be due to the importance of the case not to submit this correspondence until the accurate text can be received ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... Marble visited Florida. On November 22, under the sobriquet "Moses," he telegraphed in cipher to William T. Pelton, Tilden's nephew, then domiciled in Tilden's home at 15 Gramercy Park: "Have just received proposition to hand over a Tilden decision of Board and certificate of Governor for $200,000." Pelton thought it too much, and Marble again telegraphed that one Elector could be secured ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... largest and finest books were reprints of Caxton's folios. Mention has been made of his use of Caxton's original device without addition. In all of his own various devices also, the place of honor in the center is given to Caxton's initials and cipher, plainly as a mark of loyalty to the master, not an advertisement of ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily. Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... earth and partly in the spiritual world, and is mainly concerned with the downfall of the earthly Jerusalem and the setting up of Christ's heavenly Kingdom—the new Jerusalem. And its many mysterious symbols will be seen to have been a cipher of which the first Christians held the key, but which hid ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... the earth, is entirely wasted. We live—that is, we snatch an existence—and ourworks become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, ends in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things. It is the human being as the human being of whom I think. That the human being ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... wall is an elegant gate of delicately wrought ironwork, with the usual striped sentry boxes on either side. Around are seated Chinese statues in bronze, each upon its pedestal. Over the gateway is the Imperial cipher in bronze, and beyond in the holy of holies is the long two-storied palace of Tsarskoe-Selo, that spot forbidden to all save to the ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... Salem, and they reflected back his good-will by urging him to run for the State Legislature. Before doing this he consulted Mentor Graham, the village schoolmaster, with whom he had worked as election clerk when he first came to the place. Abe could read, write and cipher, but he felt that if he should succeed in politics, he would disgrace his office and himself by not speaking ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... consciousness of men for which the Catholic Church provided an incomparable organization. But the interval was not entirely blank on the scientific side. Our system of arithmetical notation, including that invaluable item the cipher, took shape during the Middle Ages at the hands of the Arabs, who appear to have derived it in the main from India. Its value to science is an excellent object-lesson on the importance of the details of form. Had the Greeks possessed it, who can say how far they might ...
— Progress and History • Various
... be a cipher until newspapers are abolished by law," said Claude Vignon. "You are making progress hourly," he added, addressing Finot. "You are a modern order of Jesuits, lacking the creed, the fixed idea, the discipline, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... her pocket a small medallion containing her cipher, and said to Croustillac, "See what I returned to the house to seek this evening. I desired to offer you this token of our friendship; it was in bringing it to you that I overheard your conversation with Colonel Rutler. Accept it, it will be a double souvenir of our friendship ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... church, or it doesn't matter what, as he fell. They haven't thought it worth while to make up a good story. But whether he was drunk, or whether he was escaping from the police, or what he was doing, nobody seems to know. If I'd been consulted, if I hadn't been treated as a cipher in the matter, he should have driven straight back to London again with the girl, and ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much. Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in some of the fine restaurants ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... administration of justice was committed: and, if we may credit the historian,[*] they had formed the plan of other limitations, as well as of associations to maintain them, which would have reduced the king to be an absolute cipher, and have held the crown in perpetual pupillage and dependence. The king, to satisfy them, would agree to nothing but a renewal of the charter, and a general permission to excommunicate all the violators of it; and he received no supply, except a scutage of twenty shillings on each knight's fee for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... the cosmopolite is a cipher, worse than a cipher; outside of nationality there is neither art, nor truth, nor life; there ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... no signature. Her orders or suggestions were written in the same cipher, and required much more time and thought than had been given to the buying and freeing of Pluto's pickaninny, after which she destroyed all unnecessary writings, and retired with the satisfied feeling ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... variety; and, from being the mistress of the house, she will sink into the mere slave of the husband. A wife should therefore learn to think, to walk alone, to bear her full share of the troubles and dignities of married life, never to become a cipher in her own house, but to rise to the level of her husband, and to take her full share of the matrimonial throne. The husband, if a wise man, will never act without consulting his wife; nor will she do any thing of importance without the aid and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even that ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... days of the winter, caught suddenly up with John and Silvey as they frolicked home for dinner, and brought the news that a "Jefferson Tough" had threatened to punch his face in, with no provocation whatsoever. The long-discussed secret code took a new lease on life, and cipher messages passed to the various corners of room ten with a frequency which drove Miss ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... out his own handkerchief, likewise a very elegant handkerchief, and of fine cambric—though cambric was dear at the period—but a handkerchief without embroidery and without arms, only ornamented with a single cipher, that of its proprietor. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D— cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D—, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Prince de Conde would be the next day at Ruel; that the Prince was enraged against the Cardinal, and was sure he would ruin the State if he were let alone, and that the Cardinal held a correspondence in cipher with a fellow in the Prince's army whom he had corrupted, to be informed of everything done there to his prejudice. By all this I learnt that the Prince had no great understanding with the Court, and upon his arrival at Ruel I ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... taking of Mr Greenwell;—then the slander of us both abroad;—then the ransacking anew of Erith and the other house;—then the execution of Mr Hall;—and now, last of all, the apprehension of Richard and Robert: with a cipher, I know not of whose, laid to my charge, and that which was a singular oversight, a letter in cipher, together with the ciphers—which letter ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... I said, despondently. "I know no more of shorthand than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only tangible result was ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... understood by those who have not, at one time or another, lived in the provinces. In 1789 Monsieur Grandet—still called by certain persons le Pere Grandet, though the number of such old persons has perceptibly diminished—was a master-cooper, able to read, write, and cipher. At the period when the French Republic offered for sale the church property in the arrondissement of Saumur, the cooper, then forty years of age, had just married the daughter of a rich wood-merchant. Supplied with the ready money of his own fortune and his wife's dot, in all about two thousand ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... the watery star hath been The shepherd's note since we have left our throne Without a burden: time as long again Would be fill'd up, my brother, with our thanks; And yet we should, for perpetuity, Go hence in debt: and therefore, like a cipher, Yet standing in rich place, I multiply With one we-thank-you many thousands more That ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... a cipher suddenly spunged out of his visionary ledger—rather than so much money should vanish clean out of the family, Captain Higginbotham had taken what he conceived, if a desperate, at least a certain, step for the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the door, young Mr. Cipher walked into the dentist's office instead of the doctor's. "Doctor," he groaned, "I'm in bad shape. My head aches all the time, and I can't do anything with it." "Yes, yes," said Doctor Toothaker, cheerfully. "I see; big cavity ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... little jarring laugh. "As a matter of fact—strange as it may seem—I believed in the thing. That is why I let them send out their independent expert, and held on when the stock began to drop. At the worst, I'd good reasons for believing Walmer would let me see the cipher report in time to sell. As it happened, he and the other traitor sold their own stock instead and that must have started the panic. Now they've got their report. There's no ore that will pay for milling in ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... done her some good, but Mr. Bond thought "she knew enough already. She could read, write, and cipher, and didn't she know Pilgrim's Progress from beginning to end; that was all he had ever learned, and hadn't he gone through life well ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... railway, with its crowd and quickness and unceremonious democracy of travel, served to pain and confound and humiliate that sense of individual dignity in which he had been nurtured. He felt that, once away from Rochebriant, he was but a cipher in the sum of human beings. Arrived at Paris, and reaching the gloomy hotel to which he had been recommended, he greeted even the desolation of that solitude which is usually so oppressive to a stranger in the metropolis of his native land. Loneliness was better than the loss of self in the reek ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said he, "I will see her alone before I will confer with her artful and proud mother or her cipher of a father. I will then tell her all my history, and open to her all my secrets: I will only conceal from her my present fortunes; for even if rumour should have informed her of them, it will be easy to give the report no sanction; I have a right to that trial. When she is ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there, may be mentioned that of Ali Pasha. The second gate, which is flanked by double towers, resembles that of an ancient Gothic abbey; the interior is highly ornamented with gilding and inscriptions in letters of gold; and a large gilt cipher of the Sultan decorates the front. Our attempt to pass into the second court was less successful: Mustapha being a great coward, he was afraid to offer the sentinels a bribe; yet I have no doubt that the sight of a gold dollar never fails to gain admission for ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... once come to the office a blind man with a knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... "A cipher!" said Heideck. "But we shall soon get to the bottom of it. You have some capable interpreters at your disposal, and it might be a good thing if they set ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... two Mr. Taggett stood paralyzed. Ten minutes afterwards a message in cipher was pulsing along the wires to New York, and before the sun went down that evening Richard Shackford was under the surveillance of ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of life that wavest wings of gold, Thou songless wanderer mid the songful birds, With Nature's secrets in thy tints unrolled Through gorgeous cipher, past the reach of words, Yet dear to every child In glad pursuit beguiled, Living his unspoiled days mid flowers and flocks ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Anthony Shirley, or the Earl of Rutland, or another. Others give Bacon only a portion of the plays, as those containing many legal terms. The majority, however, are thoroughgoing "Baconians," and the most prodigious cases of misapplied ingenuity have been the efforts to find in the First Folio a cipher, by which certain letters are selected which proclaim Bacon's authorship; as The Great Cryptogram, 1887, by Ignatius Donnelly, and The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, 1900, by Mrs. Gallup. Such cyphers are mutually destructive, and their ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... bald as it is, and worse than bald. It was the fashion of the day: the Reds took scalps and the Whites took scalps. It were, then, hardly fair in us to find fault with the Blacks for doing the same, especially as they could neither read nor write nor cipher, nor had been taught the absolute truths of any creed whence, as a natural consequence, proceeds that profound fixedness of belief which needs must make itself manifest in the persistent exemplification of every Christian virtue. Had they enjoyed these inestimable ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... 1643-1647, the latter valuable for the notes of proceedings in parliament, are often the only authority for incidents and speeches during that period, and are amusing from the glimpses the diarist affords of his own character, his good estimation of himself and his little jealousies; some are in a cipher ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
