"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into a state of perfect happiness,—that would have no attractions for me; there must be deficiencies in my heaven, to leave room for progression. A realm of unqualified rest were a stagnant pool of being, and the circle of absolute perfection a waveless calm, the abstract cipher of indolence. But I believe I shall be gifted with higher faculties, greater powers, and therefore be capable of higher aspirations, better achievements, and a nobler appreciation of God ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... 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 I tell ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Hilda fully matured and arranged in that scheming little head of yours; so what is your object in keeping me longer in suspense? Out with it, now! What are you—for of course I am in reality only a cipher (a tolerably large cipher) in the sum—what are you, the commander-in-chief, going to do with Hilda, the lieutenant-general? If you will kindly inform the orderly-sergeant, he will act accordingly, and endeavor ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... a copious collection of life-like and trustworthy views of the past. The secrets of diplomacy have been revealed. The official statements drawn up for the public may now be tested by the more truthful and unguarded accounts conveyed in cipher to all the foreign courts of Europe. Of not less importance, perhaps, than the official publications are the fruits of private research, among which are several valuable collections of original documents. While the author has not failed to enrich his pages with ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... when the mark was cut. A tree of this size is generally estimated at 120 years' growth; which number being subtracted from the middle year of the reign of James, would carry the year back to 1492, which would be about the period of its being planted. The tree with the cipher of William and Mary displayed its mark about nine inches within the tree, and three feet three inches from the centre. This tree was felled in 1786. The cipher of John was eighteen inches within the tree, and rather more than a foot from the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... read the story, that the best way is to hold on to what we are sure of, and not grab after a shadder and lose the whole." "Your idea is certainly a correct one," said the master, "and now we will turn to some other branch of study; can you cipher?" "Don't know, I never tried," replied the boy, with the greatest coolness imaginable. "Well," replied the teacher, "we will, after a time, see how you succeed, when you do try. Can you tell me what the study of Geography teaches us?" "O," said the boy, "geography tells all about the world, ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... from my hands, Jud holding the light and Ump turning the envelope around in his fingers, peering curiously. They might have been some guardians of a twilight country examining a mysterious passport signed right but writ in cipher, and one that from some hidden angle might ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... may be of some importance, or it would not have been kept where it was, and it would not have been written in cipher." ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Mr. Cipher taught the village school. He was tall, slim, thin-faced, with black eyes deeply set in his head, and a long, hooked nose like an eagle's bill. He wore a loose swallow-tailed coat with bright brass ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... it is an article, put a cipher in the place, and 'carry' the tens. If there is no figure to 'carry' ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... general in their nature and in all specific cases arising, my judgment was to determine, and I want to remark right here, the rapidity with which those specific cases would arise was enough to make a man faint. The first rule made was that cipher messages or those written in a foreign tongue were prohibited unless sent by a government official on public business. There were a few exceptions to this rule. For instance; many large business houses have telegraphic cipher ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... point with my brother Barberie, and, after all, it did not add a cipher to the sum-total of the assets. The best blood, Mr. Francois, is that which has been best fed. The line of Hugh Capet himself would fail, without the butcher; and the butcher would certainly fail, without customers ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... no small thing to say of the missionaries of the American Board, that in less than forty years they have taught this whole people to read and write, to cipher and to sew. They have given them an alphabet, grammar and dictionary; preserved their language from extinction; given it a literature and translated into it the Bible, and works of devotion, science and entertainment, etc. They have established schools, reared up native teachers, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... in the cipher of Throckmorton, English Ambassador in France, purporting to be a copy of a letter from the Regent to the Duc and Cardinal de Guise, dated Edinburgh, March 27, 1560. {280f} The Regent, at that date, was in Leith, not in Edinburgh Castle, where she went on April 1. ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... considerable hauteur. She was very particular in exacting certain observances in which she considered herself entitled. There were doubtless faults on both sides. Mrs. and Miss Willis took umbrage at the patronizing airs of Lady Mary, who, in her turn, complained that she was made a cipher in her own house. There were also petty jealousies on the part of Lady Mary, which led to disputes between herself and her husband. Altogether the domestic establishment at Hendon was not a harmonious one, but the means of the family were insufficient to ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... stronger point is the power of portraiture. Seraphael having been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher. Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood Burney stood for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... and lazy, but I am quite well. We saw the monastery in Hall, and I played the organ there. When you see Nadernannerl, tell her I spoke to Herr Brindl (her lover), and he charged me to give her his regards. I hope that you kept your promise and went last Sunday to D——N——[in cipher]. Farewell! write me some ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... — N. unsubstantiality[obs3], insubstantiality; nothingness, nihility[obs3]; no degree, no part, no quantity, no thing. nothing, naught, nil, nullity, zero, cipher, no one, nobody; never a one, ne'er a one[contr]; no such thing, none in the world; nothing whatever, nothing at all, nothing on earth; not a particle &c. (smallness) 32; all talk, moonshine, stuff and nonsense; matter of no importance, matter of no ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... except when checked by Lincoln or countered by Grant and Sherman in the field. When Grant was starting on his tour of inspection he found that Stanton had forbidden all War Department operators to let commanding generals use the official cipher except when in communication with himself. There were to be no secrets at the front between the commanding generals, even on matters of immediate life and death, unless they were first approved by Stanton at his leisure. The fact that the enemy could use unciphered ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... 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
... for little to the Negro's advantage. Indeed, if the strife with which he is confronted were to be waged on such an issue, the result could be foretold in advance. His warfare is moral and mental, and by the arts of peace he is to be left a cipher or rise in triumph to honorable destiny. Physical courage which the negro shows largely in common with other races has its trophies blazoned in marble and brass only to crumble beneath the corroding tooth of time. The warfare ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Earl smiling. "It only remains for you to start. Here are the papers; I advise you to keep them carefully sorted. This, in cipher, is for James. It is full of promises; and in addition, to keep his spirits up, you can give him an account of the mutiny, pointing out how near it came to success. A boat shall take you to Sevenbergen; after that you know ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suspicion that the assertion proved nothing but extreme self-satisfaction. Accordingly, as she could not afford to send her daughters to school as well as the boys, she decided to educate them herself. Everybody who could read, write, and cipher was supposed to be able to teach in those days, and Mrs. Caldwell undertook the task without a doubt of her own capacity. But Aunt ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... was not drinking wine at his betrothal feast, but sending this cipher letter by a swift and ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... entered the iron gates at the lower end of the park, and glanced at the interwoven cipher and crest of the Amelyns still above, she was conscious that the wind was blowing more chill, and that a few clouds had gathered. As she walked on down the long winding avenue, the sky became overcast, and, ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... with the fascinating thought of relieving his feelings by spanking the boy, but restrained himself reluctantly at the thought of the inevitable ruin which would ensue. He had been an inmate of the house long enough to know, with a completeness which would have embarrassed that gentleman, what a cipher Mr. Pett was in the home and how little his championship would avail in the event of a clash with Mrs. Pett. And to give Ogden that physical treatment which should long since have formed the main plank in ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... twelve Judges it must be allowed there is no cipher, because they have two figures to support them; but take these two figures away, and the whole wit of mankind may be defied to patch up or recruit the number without having recourse to the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... usual heated argument he had set about it out in the kitchen in a particularly wrathy mood. It was snowing outside. The old Squire had driven to the village; and, after doing the barn chores, Addison had retired to the sitting-room to cipher out two or three hard sums in complex fractions while I had seized the opportunity to read a book of Indian stories that Tom Edwards had lent me. After starting the churning, grandmother Ruth, assisted by the girls, was putting ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of a fatalist, did not interfere. On this cockleshell of a craft, among these rude spirits of alien races, he was powerless. On land a diplomat and strategist of high order, here he was a cipher. Moreover, he was beaten to his knees, and he knew it. The arrival of the warship had upset his calculations. After many months' planning of flight, he had been forced, by the events of a few hours, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... suspect two inoffensive-looking women? Besides, the messages were written in cipher which no one can read. Should the worst happen, however, both ladies are devoted to the cause and would rather ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... since he was a composer, he set himself to composing. Before he had even learned to write, he continued to cipher crotchets and quavers on scraps of paper, which he tore from the household account-books. But in the effort to find out what he was thinking, and to set it down in black and white, he arrived at thinking nothing, except when he wanted to think something. But he did not for that give up making ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and rest. It had been a busy, an exciting day; and Dorothy was soon asleep, though again her mind had been full of wonder concerning absent Jim and she had meant to lie awake and, as Alfy expressed it: "Cipher out ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... about them. What is called "going into society" was in her eyes one of the wearisome and rather unpleasant tasks which a conspirator who wishes not to attract the notice of spies must conscientiously fulfil. She classed it together with the laborious work of writing in cipher; and, knowing how valuable a practical safeguard against suspicion is the reputation of being a well-dressed woman, studied the fashion-plates as carefully as she did the keys of ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Edward Bowen was born in New Orleans. His father, Edward Bowen, went to New Orleans from Washington, D. C. He was a free man, a boss carpenter and builder by trade, and able to read, write and cipher. He was highly esteemed, was prosperous in business, accumulated some money and lived in comfort. Dr. Bowen's mother, Rose Bowen, he says, was the grand-daughter of an African Princess of the Jolloffer tribe, on the west coast of Africa. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp. Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher. I present the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher—in a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an interminable evening! Something stupefying like the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Emily?" said Agnes, her face brightening; "how happy I shall be! aunty has taught Effie and Grace, and they have studied Geography and History, and they can cipher, and I don't know anything at all about those things; why, even little Harry knows more than ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... for, as he says, throwing away my chances; that is to say, of marrying a man I do not care for, simply because he is rich. But I can bear that. Mother is very very good, and does all in her power to cheer me; but, as you know, she has never been much more than a cipher, accustomed always to submit to my father's will, and it is wonderful to me that in our matter she has ventured, not openly to oppose him, but to give me what ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... and thus he was saved from humiliation and discouragement, and at the same time, he was stimulated to making independent researches in the school and public libraries. Each class of honor pupil could whisper, go out, or go to the blackboards to draw or cipher without asking permission. The high sense of honor was thus developed which is so essential to ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... him, 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 had been ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... General Clery opened up signalling communication with Ladysmith by flashing his message with his searchlight at night on to the clouds. The message, which was in cipher, could be easily read by every one, but the garrison was unable to reply ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... worshippers (DCCXXV—DCCXXXV); He that is of golden complexion; He whose limbs are like gold (in hue); He that is possessed of beautiful limbs; He whose person is decked with Angadas made with sandal-paste; He that is the slayer of heroes; He that has no equal; He that is like cipher (in consequence of no attributes being affirmable of Him); He that stands in need of no blessings (in consequence of His fulness); He that never swerves from His own nature and puissance and knowledge; He that is mobile in the form of wind (DCCXXXVI—DCCXLV); He that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... confirmation—and credited by the highest authorities in Connecticut colonial history, and known only to one of them, that Grant's manuscript diary contained the significant historical note as to the fate of Alse Young. It waited two centuries and more for its true interpreter, as did Wolcott's cipher notes of Hooker's famous sermon, and there it is, "not made on the decorous pages which memorize the saints," Brookes, Hooker, Warham, Reyner, Hanford, and Huit, "but scrawled on the inside of the cover, where it might be the sinner might ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 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
... Khassias of India make cromlechs of large, flat unhewn stones, some six to seven feet high, and the Angami-Nagas of the extreme north of British India set up extensive alignments of menhirs, similar to those of France. Inscriptions in the old Irish cipher writing, known as ogham, prove that megalithic monuments were erected in Ireland after the time of St. Patrick; and, as we have already remarked, some of the Breton menhirs are surrounded by crosses. ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... separate columns on a piece of paper the individual repetitions of letters on the page of "January 7, 1915." He arrived at the conclusion, then, that "R" was used for "E," that "S" took the place of "A" and that "Y" alternated in this cipher for "T" which was second on his ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... to become the Adjutant General of Beauregard's army Colonel Thomas Jordan had given her the cipher code of the South and arranged to make her house the Northern headquarters of the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... concubine had provided the 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 to make her voice heard in affairs of State. Always on the side of ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... for them when others talk scandal. There, you see this book is ruled into little squares for the days of the week, a month on a page, and when we get through a day without saying anything against anybody we can put a nice little cross in, but when we have broken the pledge we must mark it with a cipher, and then when we are just horrid and keep on being cross, we must black the day all over. Then once a week we have to show the books to each ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the following cablegram which came into my hands, Napoleon's instructions for the French evacuation were in Mexico at the very time of this pathetic scene between him and Carlotta. The despatch was in cipher when I received it, but was translated by the telegraph operator at my headquarters, who long before had mastered the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... horror of the scene: nothing would have been effected, and almost all would in all probability have perished miserably. But this had been prevented by the presence of mind shown by Philip and the second-mate, for the Captain was a cipher:—not wanting in courage certainly, but without conduct or a knowledge of his profession. The seamen continued steady to their duty, pushing the soldiers out of the way as they performed their allotted tasks: and Philip ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... to her, after we'd had a little more talk, 's'posen you come 'round to my place to-morro' 'bout 'leven o'clock, an' mebbe we c'n cipher this thing out. I don't say positive that we kin,' I says, 'but mebbe, mebbe.' So that afternoon I sent over to the county seat an' got a description an' had a second morgidge drawed up fer two hundred dollars, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness—school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher—his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down in ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... really pretentious church-furnishings. I have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the little orphan who serves me as a handmaid. I am sitting alone on the hearth. This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other's language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man's make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prized and priced— Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... history. To him who has patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed which no political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza. He reads the secret thoughts of 'Fabius' [Philip II.] as that cunctative Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each dispatch; he pries into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius, Tullius, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... conjecture, and although it is possible that the writer of it did not arrange the letters on this principle of alphabetical order, but on some other, and thus concealed another meaning in it: for this is so improbable [especially when the cipher contains a number of words] as to seem incredible. But they who observe how many things regarding the magnet, fire, and the fabric of the whole world, are here deduced from a very small number of principles, though they deemed that I had ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... who had already exercised an important influence on British policy and who was more in sympathy with the policy of the prime minister than Dudley had been, but who was not content, like Dudley, to be a mere cipher in the department over which he was called to preside. Aberdeen, though opposed to the narrow boundaries which Wellington wished to assign to liberated Greece, was no less antagonistic than his chief to any attempt to make the new Greek state politically important; and ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... counterblast. By legal proceedings a committee had obtained from the Western Union Telegraph Company over thirty thousand of the telegrams sent by both parties during the campaign. The Republicans declared that the "cipher despatches" among these messages showed that the Democrats had offered a substantial bribe for the vote of an Oregon Republican elector. Before the dispatches were returned to the telegraph company, somebody took the precaution to destroy those that ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... whose hands chiefly the 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... 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 ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... in this novus homo, this Mr. Gilbert Glossin, late writer in—-, presuming to set up such an accommodation at all; but his wrath was mitigated when he observed that the mantle upon the panels only bore a plain cipher of G.G. This apparent modesty was indeed solely owing to the delay of Mr. Gumming of the Lyon Office, who, being at that time engaged in discovering and matriculating the arms of two commissaries from North America, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was supposed that I was asleep. The cabin was invariably locked when the barge was lying at the wharfs, if Fleming was on shore, and at no time was I permitted to enter it. Marables was a complete cipher in Fleming's hands, who ordered everything as he pleased; and in the conversations which took place before me, with much less restraint than at first, there appeared to be no idea of Fleming's leaving us. As I felt convinced that there was no chance of discovery without ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of the atmosphere as to heat, weight and moisture, the velocity of the wind, the kind, amount and speed of the clouds, and measures the rainfall and the ocean swell: all these observations are recorded, and three are daily reported to headquarters at Washington. In these telegrams a cipher is used—as much, we presume, to ensure accuracy in the figures as for purposes of secresy. In this cipher the fickle winds are given the names of women with a covert sarcasm quite out of place in the respectable old weather-prophet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... a wag—what would the wretch be at?— Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! Straight arose Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows, And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns, And disputations dire that lamed their limbs) To serve his temple and maintain the fires, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and fifty words of posthumous publicity. Within an hour after the street duel the local representative of the Associated Press had his story on the wire, and at eight-thirty next morning T. Morgan Carey, in his club at Los Angeles, read the glad tidings. By nine o'clock a cipher telegram from Carey was being clicked off to his tool in the General Land Office at Washington, instructing him to expedite the listing of the applications of Bob McGraw's clients for lieu land in ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... the premises, Hurd walked to the telegraph office, and sent a cipher message to the Yard, asking for a couple of plain clothes policemen to be sent down. He wanted to have Hokar and Miss Matilda Junk watched, also the house, in case Mrs. Krill and her daughter should return. Captain Jessop he proposed to look after himself. But he was in no hurry to make ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... for her society was based on other than physical traits. He let his eyes rest upon her for a moment in half-surprised appreciation, figuring her as half-bud, half-blossom. Really, if Addie had not been his cousin and a Jewess! She was not much of a cousin, when he came to cipher it out, but then she was a good deal of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... citizens in ignorance, and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by educational qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the land have no opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher. In the discussion as to the proper training of Negro children after they leave the public schools, we have forgotten that they are not yet decently provided with ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... will never grasp the splendid opportunities within your reach! You have no ambition but to strum that banjo, roar ridiculous songs, fuss up like a tailor's dummy, and pester your comrades, or drag them down to Jerry's for the eats! You won't be earnest, you Human Cipher, Before you entered Bannister, you formed your ideas and ideals of campus life from colored posters, moving-pictures, magazine stories, and stage dramas like 'Brown of Harvard"; you have surely lived up, or ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... come across interesting things, though. For instance, I discovered a most original cipher the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age I did not 10 know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... left school forever, with the exception of one winter's night-schooling in America, and later a French night-teacher for a time, and, strange to say, an elocutionist from whom I learned how to declaim. I could read, write, and cipher, and had begun the study of algebra and of Latin. A letter written to my Uncle Lauder during the voyage, and since returned, shows that I was then a better penman than now. I had wrestled with English grammar, and knew as little of what it was designed ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... have actual authority to do anything," Kimball returned, also in a whisper. "But we have the drawings, and that writing, which may be a clever cipher. With that I'm afraid we'll have to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... Spain or in Scotland. Up to this time in his life Charles had shown little strength of character. His existence was passed among a set of idle courtiers. He had placed himself and his broken fortunes in the hands of the ambitious La Tremoille, whose object it was that the King should be a mere cipher in his hands, and who lulled him into a false security by encouraging him to continue a listless career of self-indulgence in his various palaces and pleasure castles on the banks of the Loire. Charles had, indeed, become a mere tool in the hands of this powerful minister. The historian Quicherat ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... multitude, and among the more recent of those placed 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 ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... in their manifold ramifications. From the image, the informing 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 philosophy, and its slow progress ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... a song of welcome in Latin, written by Professor ANTONIO MIRABELLI. Then followed a grand dinner given by the municipality of the city in a hall of the hotel, which was now inaugurated and was named the Vega Hall, and was on this occasion ornamented with the royal cipher, the Swedish and Italian flags, &c. In the evening there was a gala representation at San Carlo, where the members of the Expedition scattered among the different boxes were saluted with repeated loud cries of "Bravo!"—On Tuesday the 17th the Committee had arranged ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... (xvii. 9) there was extant a collection of Caesar's letters to C. Oppius and Cornelius Balbus, written in a kind of cipher. (See Suetonius, Caesar, 56.) Two letters of Caesar to Oppius and Balbus are extant in the collection of Cicero's letters (Ad Atticum, ix. 8, 16), both expressed with admirable brevity and clearness. One of them also shows his good sense and ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... what present he desires to the bride, and, if he also wishes, to the brides- maids. If any gifts are sent to the groom, they should bear his name or cipher. ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... were a cipher, and if passion were calendar-making! . . ." retorted Philippus. "You are a very wise man, and your manuscripts and tables have stood like walls between ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... high white 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 guests ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... were put on each tag in Barbara's private cipher, understood only by Aunt Miriam. The highest was the one hoped for, the next the probable one, and the lowest one was to be taken only at the end of ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... turned eagerly to a pile of mail which he had just received, and which the coming of Calhoun had interrupted him in reading. Hurriedly running over the letters, he picked out one, and opened it with nervous fingers. It was written in cipher. Opening a secret drawer in his desk, he took out the key to the cipher, and began the translation of the dispatch. As he did so, he gave vent to ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... for this purpose. About midnight between the 20th and 21st there came a loud and persistent knocking at my door in the hotel, and there soon entered a telegraph messenger with an enormously long despatch in cipher. Hardly had I set the secretaries at work upon it than other telegrams began to come, and a large part of the night was given to deciphering them. They announced the declaration of war and instructed me to convey to the various parties interested the usual notices regarding war ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the letters to Whitelocke were in cipher, being directions to him touching the Sound. He had full intelligence of all passages of the Dutch treaty, and a copy of the articles, from Thurloe; also the news of Scotland, Ireland, France, and the letters from the Dutch Resident here to his superiors ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... of thy gracious Providence! Then shall I not be useless in my generation!—Then shall I not stand a single mark of thy goodness to a poor worthless creature, that in herself is of so small account in the scale of beings, a mere cipher on the wrong side of a figure; but shall be placed on the right side; and, though nothing worth in myself, shall give signification by my place, and multiply the blessings I owe to thy goodness, which has distinguished me by so ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... object of endeavoring to disprove and discredit these stories that the emperor caused a telegram, to be sent to the czar from Hubertusstock, not written, as usual, in cipher, but in ordinary language. There is an old French proverb according to which "he who seeks to prove too much, proves nothing," and thus it happened that this open telegram which reached the czar at Chalons, and which was published in the ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... which pleased his superiors; and it was to this quality that he owed at a later period his promotion to the rank of sub-director. His routine habits then became great experience; his manners and his silence concealed his lack of education, and his absolute nullity was a recommendation, for a cipher was needed. The government was afraid of displeasing both parties in the Chamber by selecting a man from either side; it therefore got out of the difficulty by resorting to the rule of seniority. That is how Thuillier became sub-director. Mademoiselle Thuillier, knowing ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... polluted his will with female resentment. Allen accepted the legacy, which he gave to the hospital at Bath, observing that Pope was always a bad accountant, and that if to 150 pounds he had put a cipher more he had come ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... entries in it, glancing first at the telegram and then at the book, and writing apparently one letter or figure at a time. Dodds was interested, for he knew exactly what the man was doing. He was working out a cipher. Dodds had often done it himself. And then suddenly the little man turned very pale, as if the full purport of the message had been a shock to him. Dodds had done that also, and his sympathies were all with his neighbours. Then the stranger rose, and, leaving ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inductions and summaries. Macaulay had that kind of unity. Can you read him today? Emerson rather goes out and shouts: "I'm thinking of the sun's glory today and I'll let his light shine through me. I'll say any damn thing that this inspires me with." Perhaps there are flashes of light, still in cipher, kept there by unity, the code of which the world has not yet discovered. The unity of one sentence inspires the unity of the whole—though its physique is as ragged as ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... "Couldn't read our cipher, so he was going to Nome for help, I reckon," he muttered. "All I've got to say is, it's lucky he lost it and ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... and disencumbering herself of all the Irish in town, had, by giving splendid entertainments, at an enormous expense, made her way into a certain set of fashionable company. But Lord Clonbrony, who was somebody in Ireland, who was a great person in Dublin, found himself nobody in England, a mere cipher in London, Looked down upon by the fine people with whom his lady associated, and heartily weary of them, he retreated from them altogether, and sought entertainment and self-complacency in society ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... the outlines of this scheme had been sent to Spain, and the King at once forwarded it in cipher to the Archduke at Brussels for his opinion ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... and to make use of arithmetic, but his lessons in arithmetic had to be discontinued because an ignorant guard noticed the multiplication tables that the Prince was learning and reported that he was being taught to speak and write in cipher. One of the king's men was removed from the Temple because it was said that he had used hieroglyphics in order to make secret correspondence between the king and queen easier, and even his explanation ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and who speaks most gratefully of your hospitality in Brazil, has sent me a cable on behalf of your brother—Mr. Nicholas Delora. It seems that you have not kept him acquainted with your doings here, and that you have failed to make use of a certain cipher that was agreed upon. He is, therefore, exceedingly anxious to know of your doings, and has begged me to see you at once and report. Will you, for that purpose, be good enough to grant ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flowery letters to distinguished women are preserved. On one occasion he wrote to a certain countess, informing her that he was composing a secret cipher for a key to their correspondence, and added: "I beseech you to accept the within lock (of hair). I am sorry that it is now eighteen inches shorter than it ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... us, chosen by lot, shall go to Paris and keep the rest informed, with the cipher agreed upon, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Egypt, when hearing of the precious relic, he sent for it, and added it to the other relics of Mohammed in the imperial treasury at Constantinople; giving to the convent, in return, a copy of the original certified with his own cipher. I have seen the latter, which is kept in the Sinai convent at Cairo, but I do not believe it to be an authentic document. None of the historians of Mohammed, who have recorded the transactions of almost ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... heard the sound of our locomotives. The telegraph is finished to Mining's Station, and the field-wire has just reached my bivouac, and will be ready to convey this message as soon as it is written and translated into cipher. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a cipher in the house, for no one condescended to notice him for three whole days, and it was with extreme difficulty that he could procure the means of "recruiting exhausted nature" at those particular hours which had hitherto been devoted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... South Carolina line, without owning a single acre of land,—one of the poorest of the poor whites. The boy Andrew, born shortly after his father's death in 1767, was reared in poverty and almost without education, learning at school only to "read, write, and cipher;" nor did he have any marked desire for knowledge, and never could spell correctly. At the age of thirteen he was driven from his native village by its devastation at the hands of the English soldiers, during the Revolutionary War. His mother, a worthy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... that haunts us Deceives our rash desire; It whispers of the glorious gods, And leaves us in the mire. We cannot learn the cipher That's writ upon our cell; Stars taunt us by a mystery ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which were unknown to her, were simple enough. The Ambassador had been informed that a treasure had been discovered, and had telegraphed the fact in cipher to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, who had telegraphed the news to Prince Rubomirska, who had telegraphed to the Ambassador, who was his intimate friend, requesting him to receive the Princess for a few days. ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... that there was such a thing as anxiety or misfortune. Lionel, neither the eldest nor the youngest, healthy, and independent, neither remarkable for beauty nor grace, just unruly enough to be provoking, and just steady enough to be no cause of anxiety, had been as much a cipher in the family as a One lively boy could be; but though slow to be roused into anxiety, she felt it with full force when it came, all the motherly affection, which while secure had appeared dormant, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... engraving of an intricate cipher beneath the fantastic crest of some wealthy epicurean, who had ordered a complete dessert-service of such charming forms and graceful designs that envy of his taste, if not of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... imperial, and a total incapacity for telling the truth. In that, he was inferior to his wife in point of social evolution, for she had learned, from certain episodes which still filled her with mortification, that fibbing was bad form. To Mrs. Lloyd Avalons, her husband was a mere cipher. Placed before her, he added nothing to her value; placed after and in the background, he multiplied her importance tenfold. There were certain privileges accruing to a woman with a husband, certain immunities that followed in the train of matrimony. Mrs. Lloyd Avalons was quite ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... into a little purse, the tissue of which was extremely simple; but which appeared above all price to Paul, when he perceived a P and a V intwined together, and knew that the beautiful hair which formed the cipher was ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... we do not set down Woman as a cipher in the account of human beings. We accord to her her full share of importance in the world, and we have not attempted to relieve her from a sense of her responsibility as an accountable being. Above all, we have not failed to impress upon her the obligations she is under to CHRISTIANITY, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... Antonovsky, of the old Russian Military Academy, who also assisted in the drafting of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans, was a participant in the scheme, and was within an ace of becoming the admiral's Chief of Staff. Everything was working splendidly, when the cipher message from Renoff opened the ball. Beloff was sent to the east, and Antonovsky to the south, and the ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... 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, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 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 opening and shutting her fan. Was that some one coming ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... friends, he will append such 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... method of discovering that Shakespeare was not himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not with generalities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, covered with hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher which he thinks the plays contain—such sample page is certainly a marvel, even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and "Looking Backward." A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanation makes marvelous ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... myself deeply to blame. Weeks ago I could have warned you that Domiloff was still in the capital plotting against you. I kept silent. I beg that you will not ask me why. The news which has brought me here now has come by cipher telegram from my chief. A secret treaty has been signed between Russia and Turkey. The terms I do not know, but Turkey is left free to attack you at once, and she is already moving troops ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... young women—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old—who read ST. NICHOLAS, who understand the most complex vulgar fractions, who cipher out logarithms "just for fun," who chatter familiarly about "Kickero" and "luliuse Kiser," and can bang a piano dumb and helpless in fifteen minutes—they, I suppose, will think me frivolous and unaspiring if I beg them to lay aside their ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... she may originate through Persia. And in that we see the remarkable case realized—that two ciphers may politically form an affirmative power of great strength by combining: Russia, though a giant otherwise, is a cipher as to India by situation—viz. by distance, and the deserts along the line of this distance. Persia, though not so ill situated, is a cipher by her crazy condition as to population and aggressive resources. But this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... I am the guilty cause. I did the deed, Thy murderer. Yea, I guilty plead. My henchmen, lead me hence, away, away, A cipher, less ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... Code, Cipher. A code of arbitrary words to designate prearranged or predetermined words, figures or sentences. The systems used in commerce have single words to represent whole sentences or a number of words of a sentence. This not only imparts a degree ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... happy. As the ages roll on woman has materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at nothing. She soars. She demands the co-education of sexes. She thinks nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but one married man who gained any decided ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... helps. He must surmount these obstacles with the single strength that God has given him; he cannot reckon on any other aid than chance and opportunity. No one reaps, manufactures, fights, or thinks for him; he is nothing to any one. He is a unit multiplied by the cipher of his own single powers; while the civilized man is a unit multiplied by the ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... here to Antipater, but to Hyrcanas, Antiq. B. XIV. ch. 8. sect. 5, has hardly an appearance of a contradiction; Antipater being now perhaps considered only as Hyrcanus's deputy and minister; although he afterwards made a cipher of Hyrcanus, and, under great decency of behavior to him, took the real ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... these letters been arranged? He who held the paper was alone able to tell. With such cipher language it is as with the locks of some of our iron safes—in either case the protection is the same. The combinations which they lead to can be counted by millions, and no calculator's life would suffice to express them. Some particular "word" has to be known before ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... "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 to work ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a marquis of Louis XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most Christian Majesty ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... all to know, you all to know, Dare's light on de shore, Says little Bill to big Bill, There's a li'l nigger to write and cipher.' ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... circumstances which had induced him to lay his monk's dress aside. It is a passionate apology, pathetic and ornate. The letter, as we know it, does not contain a direct request. In an appendix at the end, written in cipher, of which he sent the key in sympathetic ink in another letter, the chancery was requested to obviate the impediments which Erasmus's illegitimate birth placed in the way of his promotion. The addressee, Lambertus Grunnius, apostolic ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... (No. 14. p. 215.).—Zero Ital.; Fr. un chiffre, un rien, a cipher in arithmetic, a nought; whence the proverb avere nel zero, mepriser souverainement, to value at nothing, to have a sovereign contempt for. I do not know what the etymology of the word may be; but the application is obvious to that point in the scale of the ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... 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 ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... merks for an old Blue-Gown! Think on the act 1701 regulating bail-bonds!Strike off a cipher from the sumI am content to bail ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... disguise, and on the table beside him were the Bible and a few theological works dear to the hearts of his sect. I gave him the box, telling him its history. The letter was brief and was written in cipher. ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... read, write, and cipher in common arithmetic; had been to the United States, and spoke English quite well. His education was as good as that of three-quarters of the Yankees in California, and his manners and principles a good deal better, and he was so quick of ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... other item from Archenholtz: "Mice being busy in these Hanover Magazines, it is decided to have cats, and a requisition goes out accordingly [cipher not given]: cats do execution for a time, but cannot stand the confinement," are averse to the solitary system, and object (think with what vocality!): "upon which Hanover has to send foxes and weasels." ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher, to the rule of three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or, the writing is a cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn fowls, scolding them ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... game for one of her class. Cute Yankee as she believes herself to be, she's a fool to think that either of them is more than playing with her. By Jupiter! but it would be sport to cut 'em both out; and I could do it if I were up here a week. Those who know the world know that such women cipher out these matters in the spirit of New England thrift, and you have only to mislead them with sufficient plausible data to capture them body and soul." And Sibley complacently sipped his wine as if he had stated ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... read de Bible. Dey wuz a free nigger boy in de settlement w'at wuz monst'us smart, en could write en cipher, en wuz alluz readin' books er papers. En Dave had hi'ed dis free boy fer ter l'arn 'im how ter read. Hit wuz 'g'in de law, but co'se none er de niggers didn' say nuffin ter de w'ite folks 'bout it. Howsomedever, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... never before had she known what she 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 in that moment, and it made her feel the way you ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... had 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 he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me his method, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... "Let me cipher it out." Amos Green sat on a fallen maple with his head sunk upon his hands. "Well," said he presently, "if it's no good going on, and no good going back, there's only one way, and that is to go to one side. That's so, Ephraim, ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... much. I see your father in you. I knew your father very well, young sir. I dare say in some odd corners of my house, you might find some old things with his crest and cipher upon them still. Well, I like you: you shall have the mirror at the fourth part of what I asked for it; but upon ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... is at stake, and to be asserted and preserved only by a vote in the negative. We hear it said that this is a struggle for liberty, a manly resistance against the design to nullify this assembly and to make it a cipher in the government; that the President and Senate, the numerous meetings in the cities, and the influence of the general alarm of the country, are the agents and instruments of a scheme of coercion and terror, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... dropped from his pocket when he came to me to borrow the flashlight. I intended to give it back to him, as it is one he wrote to some friend and evidently forgot to mail. It contains nothing of importance, as far as I can see, though it may be in cipher. But this letter, signed with his name, is in the same hand as the one signed 'Henry Littlefield,' ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... warped and unpleasant nature, I do not know; but she now slowed down to walk, and even began to peck in a tentative manner at the grass. Her behaviour infuriated me. I felt that I was being treated as a cipher. I vowed that this bird should realise yet, even if, as seemed probable, I burst in the process, that it was no light matter to be pursued by J. Garnet, author of "The Manoeuvres of Arthur," etc., a man of whose work so capable ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Hongkong junta voted that Aguinaldo ought to go to the Philippines, and go he did. It would seem that he at first gave up the idea of joining Dewey, for on May 11 he wrote a cipher letter, giving minute directions for the preparation of signals to assist his ship in making land, by day or by night, at Dingalan Bay on the east coast of Luzon; directing the capture of the town of San Antonio, just back of ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... admiral, alcohol, algebra, assassin, camphor, caravan, chemistry, cipher, coffee, elixir, gazelle, lemon, ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... when the 'tawny' man crossed our path, I took from the first a rather more serious view of his scope and intention than you did. The same day I sent a cipher cable to Pierson of the New York service. I asked for news of any man of such and such a description—merely negative—who was known to have left the States; an educated man, expert in the use of disguises, audacious in his operations, and a specialist in ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... come from the City Bank. I had not then stopped to analyze its character, for there had been only time to announce it. Now, however, I sat down at my desk and with a pencil and a piece of paper began to cipher out what the "412 millions" meant. As I figured, cold sweat began to gather on my forehead, and the further I figured the colder the sweat, until at last in an agony of perplexity I again called up Mr. Rogers. My agitation must have betrayed ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... "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 and such small matters, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of the empire the boys are taught by priests to read, write, and cipher. Every monastery is provided with a library, more or less standard. The more elegant books are composed of tablets of ivory, or of palmyra leaves delicately prepared; the characters engraved on these are gilt, the margins and edges adorned with heavy gilding or with ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... her room, and worked till late on a cipher dispatch to Napoleon. Its purport was, that now, if ever, Maximilian must be discouraged absolutely. Following on what she herself had done, such would bring his abdication. She implored, above all things, that Bazaine be kept from meddling, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... 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 ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... "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[21]. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... had far more obviously than most artists. When he was a student he excelled in mathematics; in all his other tales he displays the same power of logical construction; and he delighted in the exercise of his own acumen, vaunting his ability to translate any cipher that might be sent to him and succeeding in making good his boast. In the criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' and again in the explanation of the Maelzel chess-player, Poe used for himself the same faculty of divination, the same power ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... second or 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
... Not use my judgment, but depend on theirs? Shall I, true puppet-like, be mock'd with state, Have nothing but the name of being great; Attend at councils which I must not weigh; Do what they bid, and what they dictate, say; Enrobed, and hoisted up into my chair, Only to be a royal cipher there? 260 Perish the thought—'tis treason to my throne— And who but thinks it, could his thoughts be known Insults me more than he, who, leagued with Hell, Shall rise in arms, and 'gainst my crown rebel. ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... My dear boy knows, and will give you to know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and I've his books at home to show it! Aye, have I!' said Mrs. Pegler, with indignant pride. 'And my dear boy knows, and will give you to know, sir, that after his beloved father died, when he was eight ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens* |
