"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... maps and sketches, that doesn't mean that they would make everything on them so plain that you could guess it at first sight. That sort of mark is awfully easy to understand when you have the key, but it's as bad as a cipher if you haven't." ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... for an old Blue-Gown! Think on the act 1701 regulating bail-bonds!Strike off a cipher from the sumI am content to bail him ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... supply the Spaniards with provisions. Lavezaris asks that more married men be sent to the islands. Some remarkably fine pearls have been obtained near Bantayan. He asks the viceroy to provide him with a cipher code ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... ledge, "if ever you wants a chap to do you a turn, don't ye forget there's one inside this waistcoat as will take a leap in a halter any day to please ye. You drop a line to 'Gentleman Jim,' at the Sunflower, High Holborn. O! I can read, bless ye, and write and cipher too. What I says I sticks to. No offence, miss. I wonder will ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... lowest depths of vileness, become an unspeakable cipher of cowardice and servility—she signed endless lists of crimes which she had never committed. Was she worth the trouble of burning? Many had given up that idea, but the ruthless Penitentiary clung to it still. He offered money to a Wizard ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... would foller on and cipher out this simple rule, and get the correct answer to it, the cramp in the right hands of divorce lawyers would almost ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... and never too familiar, but just familiar enough. Women liked him; he was so respectful, almost reverent, in his attitude toward them. It took a better man to be a salesman then than now. Every article was marked in cipher, with two prices. One figure represented what the thing cost and the other was the selling-price. You secured the selling-price, if you could, and if you couldn't, you took what you could get, right down to the cost figure. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... day, she somehow had by mistake placed in her basket a dozen of table-knives and a plated egg-stand. When the lady's-maid took a walk in the course of the afternoon, she found she had occasion for eight cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, (marked with her mistress's cipher), half-a-dozen pair of shoes, gloves, long and short, some silk stockings, and a gold-headed scent-bottle. "Both the new cashmeres is gone," said she, "and there's nothing left in Mrs. Walker's trinket-box but a paper ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sprite 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 Which we could ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... 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, no patriotic ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... family (save absent Marian) was now gathered in the dining-room, another apartment on whose physiognomy were written in cipher the annals of the vivacious tribe. Here the curtains were drawn, and all the interest of the room centred on the large white gleaming table, about which the members stood or sat under the downward radiance of a chandelier. Beyond the circle illuminated by the shaded chandelier could ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to Paris, he had known how to read, write, and cipher, and at that point his education had been arrested. There had been no opportunity in his hard-working life of acquiring new ideas and information beyond the perfumery trade. He had spent his time among folk ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... effective as ten with the needle telegraph, and consequent economy in the construction of telegraphic lines of communication. The secrecy of correspondence would also be maintained in a greater degree by the copying telegraph, as it would afford peculiar facility for transmitting messages in cipher, and the telegraph clerks, instead of being compelled by their duties to read all the messages transmitted, might be forbidden from perusing any portion but the address. As an additional means of secrecy, the messages may be transmitted ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... a woman, who has charge of a large household, should regard her duties as dignified, important, and difficult. The mind is so made, as to be elevated and cheered by a sense of far-reaching influence and usefulness. A woman, who feels that she is a cipher, and that it makes little difference how she performs her duties, has far less to sustain and invigorate her, than one, who truly estimates the importance of her station. A man, who feels that the destinies of a nation are turning ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... are near the end: "Two Miles Yet," says the legend. The road goes ploughing up and down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms, are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them: two miles! it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the distant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bayne, "he is no worse than the rest, believe me. What does any master care for a man's life? Profit and loss go down in figures; but life—that's a cipher in ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... and he had come from Illinois with Mr. Grant to work on the farm. He had no parents living, and was expected to remain with his employer till he was twenty-one. He was an uncouth fellow, and though he could read, write, and cipher, he seemed to be as uncultivated and bearish as the wild Indians that roamed through the country. Fanny tried to be his friend, and never neglected an opportunity to do him a kindness; but the more she tried ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... land the scheme? I know him. You put him on that German cipher-code job down Honolulu way, an' it cost you about a thousand before you could pull out. We'll give ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... 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 Sir Robert Walpole in power. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... 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 science,—which is admirable,—and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... right; she wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being. She is seeking not to be governed by laws in the making of which she has no voice. She is deprived of almost every right in civil society, and is a cipher in the nation, except in the right of presenting a petition. In religious society her disabilities have greatly retarded her progress. Her exclusion from the pulpit or ministry, her duties marked out for her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Ritterdom,—and lasted into the thirteenth year, before it could go out again; out by lack of fuel mainly. One of the fellest wars on record, especially for burning and ruining; above '300,000 fighting-men' are calculated to have perished in it; and of towns, villages, farmsteads, a cipher which makes the fancy, as it were, black and ashy altogether. Ritterdom showed no lack of fighting energy; but that could not save it, in the pass things were got to. Enormous lack of wisdom, of reality and human ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 willing ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... lad 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 ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, that the Black Sea question was one on ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... circling round Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned. Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault; The village{8} all declared how much he knew; 'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too; Lands he could measure, terms and tides{9} presage, And e'en the story ran that he could gauge:{10} In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill; For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still; While words of learned length and thundering sound Amazed the gazing ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... to be all things to all men, at least for the hour or two that he still has to live; and observing that Aramis has dropped a handkerchief, and placed his foot upon it, he hastens to drag it from under his boot, and present it to him with a most gracious bow and smile. A coronet and cipher on the embroidered cambric attract notice, and draw down a shower of raillery upon the head of the mousquetaire, who, in order to shield the honour of a lady, is compelled to deny that the handkerchief is his. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... she threaded her needle and snipped off the yarn before she answered, "No, thank you, Becky. Mother couldn't do without me, and I hate going to school. I can read and write and cipher as well as anybody now, and that's enough for me. I'd die rather than teach school for a living. The winter'll go fast, for Will Melville is going to lend me his mother's sewing machine, and I'm going to make white petticoats out of the piece of muslin aunt Jane sent, and have ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "It's here in this cipher," said the man, drawing out a dirty piece of paper. "It's well known, and you can have this. Here's the key. It was written by 'Deafy' Smith, and the police ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... 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 absurdity has been ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... on, 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 ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... spoke Italian perfectly, having lived among us and taken degrees at our Universities, getting through our lines in the first confusion, dressed in Italian uniform, and sending false telephone messages and signals in our own cipher, ordering a general retreat.[1] It was men from ——,[2] who first ran away at Rombon and Tolmino. It has been often proved in the history of our country that those men have no courage. ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... signal!" suggested Sam. "Maybe everything he does is part of a cipher code! He gives the signals and the Times men read them ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... of getting a half-dozen fish for breakfast. He always had a kind word or two for Tom, who during the winter evenings would go over to the good man's house to learn his letters, and to read and write and cipher a little, so that by now he was able to spell the words out of the Bible and the almanac, and knew enough to change tuppence ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... came the astonishing news, by cipher despatch from old Jasper Titus's principal adviser in London, that his offer of one million dollars had been declined by Tarnowsy two days before, the Count having replied through his lawyers that nothing short of two millions ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... with as much speed as we could make to Amida, a city celebrated at a later period for the disaster which befel it. And when our scouts had rejoined us there we found in one of their scabbards a scrap of parchment written in cipher, which they had been ordered to convey to us by Procopius, whom I have already spoken of as ambassador to the Persians with the Count Lucillianus; its terms were purposely obscure, lest if the bearers should be taken prisoners, and the sense of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... little country school, where he learned to read, write, and cipher. By the time he was twelve, he could write a clear, bold hand. In one of his writing-books he copied many good rules or sayings. ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... the United States of having stolen the cipher key of the LUXBURG despatches. It is this sort of thing that is gradually convincing Germany that it is beneath her dignity to fight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... dead emperor in full profile, which was engraved in England and France, and considered a striking likeness. He was meanwhile no doubt perfecting the code of signals for the use of merchant vessels of all nations, including the cipher for secret correspondence, which was immediately adopted, and secured to its inventor the Cross of the Legion of Honour from Louis Philippe. It was not actually published in book form till 1837, from which date its sale ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... says 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, an' Mis' Cullom signed it mighty quick. I had the morgidge made one ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... don't mind, I will take my check and go. I'll be back again, but don't think it advisable to come often. I have prepared a short telephone cipher code by which we can carry on a commonplace conversation over the wire and let each other know if all is well or if trouble is brewing or has already broken. Here is a ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... series of infinitives relate to the same object, the word to should be used before the first verb and omitted before the others; as, "He taught me to read, write, and cipher." "The most accomplished way of using books at present is to serve them as some do lords— learn their titles and ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... 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 ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the rule of three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood he was looked upon as a wizard.... 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.... The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... 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 of secrecy, but makes the messages ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... shoulders, and accepted my offer for a bear speculation. We agreed that from time to time we should communicate with each other in cipher. Telegrams were to be forwarded ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher. The white teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common school system. They had no idea of founding colleges; they themselves at first would have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... stood 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 opening and shutting her fan. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... 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 Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second—that he took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish" passages—proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the "greatness of his behaviour" at the approach ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 that the figures he had made use of were only arithmetic tables which ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... entered the house he began to write and cipher on the walls, the blinds, the table, everything, in the most abstracted manner. He frequently composed on slips of paper, which he afterward misplaced, so that he had great difficulty in finding them. At one time, indeed, he forgot ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... There hardly exists another instance of such a striking contrast between projects and facts. Mary composes these letters full of far-ranging and dangerous schemes in the deepest secrecy, as she thinks, and has them carefully re-written in cipher: she has no doubt that they reach her friends safely by a secret way: but arrangements are made so that every word she writes is laid before the man whose business it is to trace out conspiracies, Walsingham, the Secretary ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... heard, and he pretended he heard it too, and persuaded her that if she lay very still it would run past. Nothing she said or did puzzled him. He read the raving of her mind, they declared admiringly, as if he held the cipher to it. ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... ages when it had received additions, had a striking and imposing effect. An immense gate, composed of rails of hammered iron, with many a flourish and scroll, displaying as its uppermost ornament the ill-fated cipher of C. R., was now decayed, being partly wasted with rust, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the cable cipher and read it to himself again. If Mr. Hunt had known its contents he need not have waited for Philip ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 codes for the transaction of business, and it was ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... 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
... marks or signals showing whether friends or enemies had passed that way. These marks were devised by the chiefs of the different tribes, and were duly communicated to the war leaders of tribes in friendship or alliance, like our cipher codes; and equally they were changed from time to time to baffle the enemy. Neither hunters nor main body ever got in front of the advance guard, lest they should give an alarm. Thus they travelled until they got ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Bailiff, behind a huge inkstand and piles of books and papers, looked at me from out of his huge wig like an owl from out its nest, and began: "What's your name? Where do you come from? Can you read, write, and cipher?" And when I assented, he went on, "Well, her Grace, in consideration of your good manners and extraordinary merit, appoints you to the vacant post of Receiver of Toll." I hurriedly passed in mental ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... a pause, then click! click! the instrument gave the code signal that the matter was ended, and I repeated the signal, opened my code-book, and began to translate the instructions into cipher for safety's sake. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... were too hurried to look at that. 'Miss Childe's compliments, and Nobby will be round this evening.'" Hardly I suppressed an exclamation. "We're all mad to know what it means. Berry scents an intrigue and says it's a cipher." ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... remarks a prophecy? He had hardly ceased speaking when an officer appeared with a telegram in his hand. This the major eagerly took and, noting that it was in cipher, read it by means of the code he carried in his ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... old habits. But by an' by Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never pannin' out anything. At last he got to comin' down in the shaft, hisself, to try to cipher it out. An' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel kind o' scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted—knowin' as he did, that the bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent—he would curl up on a gunny-sack in the corner an' go to sleep. Well, one day when the shaft was down ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... six. The King made a gesture which meant that the time of music was over, and Eustace went back to the canteen, where the men of the guard were playing at dice by the light of smoky rush-lights. The King lay down on his wooden pallet, whose linen was delicate and of lawn, embroidered with his own cipher and crown. The pillow, which was stuffed with scented rushes, was delicious ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... tawdry toilette of the lady's-maid EN VOYAGE)—and a miserable DAME DE COMPAGNIE, are ministering to the wants of her ladyship and her King Charles's spaniel. They are rushing to and fro with eau-de-Cologne, pocket-handkerchiefs, which are all fringe and cipher, and popping mysterious cushions behind and before, and in every available corner of ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... down on Miss Tonk's card the small purple cipher that stood for hm—hm. "I will make enquiries ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... 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 ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... a space for the white box upon a broad old bureau-top in her room. She put its cover on again over the message in green cipher; she would only care to look at it on purpose, and once in a while; she would not keep it out to the fading light and soiling touch of every day. She spread across the cover itself and its written sentence her last remaining broidered and laced handkerchief. The wreath would dry, she ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to see if you understand division. Suppose you had ten bits of sugar, and you met ten Prussian dogs, how many lumps would you, a French dog, give to each of the Prussians?' Lyda very decidedly replied to this with a cipher. 'But, suppose you divided your sugar with me, how many lumps would you give me?' Lyda took up the figure five and politely presented ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... to you," she said. "I do not even 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 ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... editor came in a hurry, and tried his luck. A city editor must know something about everything; so Scott knew a little about cipher-writing. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... right or wrong? Who can decide? Have beasts or men most claim to live? God wots! He is the unit, we the cipher-dots. Ranged in the order a great hunt should have, They soon between the trunks espy the cave. "Yes, that is it! the very mouth of the den!" The trees all round it muttered, warning men; Still they kept step and neared it. Look you now, Company's pleasant, and there ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... But, after considerable reflection, I have come to the conclusion that my talents lie elsewhere. At lugging ledgers I am among the also-rans—a mere cipher. I have been wanting to speak to you about this for some time. If you have no objection, I should like ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... that thar old fool cotton mill and hire out, to name it to you that Shade Buckheath would stand some watchin'. Your Uncle Pros has got sense—in streaks. Why in the world you'll pike out and go to work in a cotton mill is more than I can cipher." ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... paymaster with Lord North, by the Duke of Bedford's ally, Lord Sandwich. General Conway was appointed lieutenant-general of the ordnance; and the ministry, thus reconstructed, took the name of the Duke of Grafton's administration. As for the Earl of Chatham he was still a cipher, keeping aloof at Bath, or at Burton Pynsent, or at Hayes in Kent, where he would neither see nor speak to anybody. But he still retained the privy seal, and still retained the emoluments of office, and the king was afraid to deprive ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... done something in our generation; that we 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
... to be thought of as savages. Far from it. They can read and they can write, in English as well as Maori. They can read the newspaper or the Bible to their less accomplished papas and mammas. They can cipher and sew; have an idea of the rotundity of the earth, with some knowledge of the other countries beyond the sea. They are fully up in all the subjects that are usually taught in Sunday schools. They can play croquet—with flirtation accompaniment—and wear chignons. Oh no! they are not savages. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... "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 ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... a life of my own,— Not merely a casual bit Of somebody else's life, flung out That, taking hold of it, I may stand as a cipher ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... 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 fulfil 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 ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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
... down 20s. upon a card when only eight are in hand; the last card was a cipher, so there were four places to lose, and only three to win, the odds against being as 4 to 3. If 10 cards only were in, then it was 5 to 4 against the player; in the former case it was the seventh part of the money, whatever it was, L1 or L100; in the latter case, a ninth. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... 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 ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... whose legend—'Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. F. Fecit Anno Gratiae MCCCCL'—occupies every arch and stringcourse of the architecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with his cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in every piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to fill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God. Yet the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... than the end of a Ministry, to a great extent it was the end of the system of personal government by the sovereign." "The King," wrote Selwyn, on March 27th, "will have no more personal friends, as Lord Hertford says; there will be no opposition to that in this new Government, what a cipher his Majesty will be you may guess." Selwyn had no great respect for the King, and not much liking for his minister, Lord North. "I see him in no light, but that of a Minister, and in that I see him full of defects, and of ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... 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
... his eyes and ears open, and before long he had another detail to report by cipher telegram to the general manager. Ford was evidently preparing for another absence, and from what the chief clerk could overhear, he was led to believe that the pseudo supervisor of track would be left in ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... 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 German newspapers, even before Nicholas had ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the office and examined things. It was evident in a moment how it had been done. Withers had signed an order for the removal of five boxes. The compradore had deftly added a cipher and raised it to fifty. And so on. Done repeatedly, with neatness and precision, over Withers' own signature. No wonder the streets about the godowns had presented an ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... volumes of manuscript correspondence between the governments of Rome and Venice, from the time of Pope Paul Caraffa downwards. Monsignor Molsa, a great friend of the late professor, knowing of these volumes, which were in cipher, with their interpretations, hastened to tell Cardinal Antonelli, who dispatched orders just in time to save the secrets of the state from further exposure. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... then of a 'Comte de Rothenbourg,' conspicuous in the Parisian circles; a shining military man, but seemingly in want of employment; who has lost in gambling, within the last four years, upwards of 50,000 pounds (1,300,000 livres, the exact cipher given). This is the Graf von Rothenburg whom Friedrich made acquaintance with, in the Rhine Campaign six years ago, and has ever since had in his eye;—whom, in a few weeks hence, Friedrich beckons over to him into the Prussian States: 'Hither, and you shall have work!' Which Rothenburg ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... say ye hev applied fur the place o' postmaster?" Tyler prosed on. "All that takes a power o' knowledge—readin' an' writin' an' cipher-in' an' sech. How air ye expectin' to hold out, 'kase I know ye never hed no mo' larnin' than me, an' I war acquainted with ye till ye war ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... — N. unsubstantiality^, insubstantiality; nothingness, nihility^; 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of its announcement, lest some other astronomer might intervene. How, then, was he to secure his priority if the discovery should turn out correct, and at the same time be enabled to perfect it at his leisure? He adopted the course, usual at the time, of making his first announcement in cipher, and accordingly, on March 5th, 1656, he published a tract, which ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Nevermore was the bridge across the Irwell a bridge of sighs for me. And the meanest of the factory population—thanks be to their discrimination—despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a thought or a menace upon a cipher ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... children who, as Father said, "took to larnin'," though in seventy-five years of poring over books and periodicals I have not become "learned." But I easily distanced the other children in school. The others barely learned to read and write and cipher a little, Curtis and Wilson barely that, Hiram got into Greenleaf's Grammar and learned to parse, but never to write or speak correctly, and he ciphered nearly through Dayball's Arithmetic. I went through Dayball and then Thompkins ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... 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; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... then operating below Petersburg, who caught the telegraphic cipher of the rebels and by tapping their wires caught many messages which were of material assistance to General Grant in the closing movements of the war. It was he also who in like manner caught the movements of Jeff Davis and his cabinet in their efforts to escape, and put ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... had been tortured by the idea of owing a paltry three thousand pounds, was henceforward to count her thousands by the hundred. Her senses reeled before that dazzling vision of figures with rows of ciphers after them, one cipher more or less meaning the difference between thousands and millions. Everybody had agreed in assuring her that Mr. Smithson was inordinately rich. Everybody had considered it his or her business to give her ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the name of the figure 0. The word is derived from the Arabic sifr empty, nothing. Hence zero. A cipher is the symbol of the absence of number or of zero quantity. It may be used alone or in conjunction with digits or other ciphers, and in the latter case, according to the position which it occupies relative to the other figures, ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... extensive changes in labor and in the conditions surrounding home and child life, has since completely altered the face of the earlier educational problem. What was simple once has since become complex, and the complexity has increased with time. Once the ability to read and write and cipher distinguished the educated man from the uneducated; to-day the man or woman who knows only these simple arts is an uneducated person, hardly fit to cope with the struggle for existence in a modern world, and certainly not fitted ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... over to me and took the lantern and the letter 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
... at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the farther systems: Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward, outward, and forever outward: My sun has his sun, and around him obediently wheels; He joins with his partners a group of superior ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... superficies. And granted, as you imagined, a whole composed of a thousand points, if we divide any part of this quantity of a thousand, we can very well say that this part shall equal its whole; and this we can prove by zero, or naught, that is, the tenth figure of arithmetic, which is represented by a cipher as being nothing, and placed after unity it will signify 10, and if two ciphers are placed after unity it will signify 100, and thus the number will go on increasing by ten to infinity whenever a cipher is added, and the ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... multiplier, as you choose. The above is a very easy feat; but it is also required to find the two arrangements giving pairs of the highest and lowest products possible. Of course every counter must be used, and the cipher may not be placed to the left of a row of figures where it would have no effect. Vulgar fractions ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... hit. He matched Injun cunnin' agin the 'white laws' en got ostracized. He raised his boys by the same standards. This Hulls is jist dumb en ornery but Archie was smart. He l'arned to read, en when Maizie came, he l'arned to write en cipher after he was a grown man. If Archie got the express company's money—en hit sorta looks like he did—he was smart enough to 'duck out' with hit. Maizie knows that Archie ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... see so considerable 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
... waited about for a couple of days, I saw no sign of him. I made my final attempt to get out and it failed, so, when I fled to Berlin, I knew that I had cut off all means of communication with home. As a last hope, I dashed off that cipher on the spur of the moment and tucked it into old ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... looked for all I had left, found only a piece of the McRae, which, as it was labeled in full, I was surprised they had spared. Precious letters I found under heaps of broken china and rags; all my notes were gone, with many letters. I looked for a letter of poor ——, in cipher, with the key attached, and name signed in plain hand. I knew it would hardly be agreeable to him to have it read, and it certainly would be unpleasant to me to have it published; but I could not find it. Miriam thinks she saw something answering the description, ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... 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, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Majesties were adored. Marie Antoinette, with all her beauty and amiableness, was a mere cipher in the eyes of France previous to her becoming the mother of an heir to the Crown; but her popularity now arose to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... clever, intriguing waiting-woman of Isabinda, daughter of Sir Jealous Traffick. As she was handing a love-letter in cipher to her mistress, she let it fall, and Sir Jealous picked it up. He could not read it, but insisted on knowing what it meant. "O," cried the ready wit, "it is a charm for the toothache!" and the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... her faction, to Campeggio and Clement VII., as well as to Henry VIII.[675] "These Lords intend," wrote Du Bellay, on the eve of Wolsey's fall, "after he is dead or ruined, to impeach the State of the Church, and take all its goods; which it is hardly needful for me to write in cipher, for they proclaim it openly. I expect they will do fine miracles."[676] A few days later he says, "I expect the priests will never have the great seal again; and that in this Parliament they will have terrible alarms. I think Dr. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... away Trogool upon the utter Rim turned a page that was numbered six in a cipher that none might read. And as the golden ball went through the sky to gleam on lands and cities, there came the Fog towards it, stooping as he walked with his dark brown cloak about him, and behind him slunk the Night. And as the golden ball rolled past the Fog suddenly ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... which she had been cruelly and unjustly deprived. With great effrontery she persisted in denying that she had ever entertained with Babington any correspondence whatever; and she urged that his pretending to receive, or having in fact received, letters written in her cipher, was no conclusive proof against her; since it was the same which she used in her French correspondence, and might have fallen into other hands. But finding herself hard pressed by evidence on this ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... If 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
... I wonder if Rhoda has given Susan a hint, and if that was what made Susan so gracious about my leaving home? But I don't believe she did—I mean that Susan suspected that George and Rhoda had any particular reason for inviting me. I wonder if I shall ever make Susan see that I am not a cipher? Of course if George and Rhoda really have any particular reason, and Susan comes to know it, that will show her that other people do not consider me a cipher. I wonder what most people would think of Mr. Iglesias? Of course he has only been a bank clerk; but then so has ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... interlaced, old-fashioned cipher. That Z. H. that she knew of old stood for Zachary Hepburn, Philip's father. She knew how Philip valued this watch. She remembered having seen it in his hands the very day before his disappearance, when ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Merchant Adventurers, until their interests were transferred to the colonists by the "Composition" of 1626, and three years later (1629) sent by the MAY-FLOWER, on her second New England voyage, although under a Puritan charter, another company from the Leyden congregation. The (cipher) letter of the "Governor and deputies of the New-England Company for a plantation in Massachusetts Bay" to Captain John Endicott, written at Gravesend, England, the 17th of April, 1629, says: "If you want any Swyne wee have agreed with those of Ne[w] Plimouth that they deliver you ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... and nothing-to-do days! The sit-by-yourself-for-there's-nothing-new days! When the cat that Care killed without excuse With your inner self's crying, "Oh, what's the use?" And you wonder whatever is going to become of you, And you feel that a cipher expresses the sum of you; And you know that you'll never, Oh, never, be clever, Spite of all your endeavor Or hard work or whatever! Oh, gee! What a mix-up you see When you look at the world where you happen to be! Where strangers are hateful and friends are a bore, And you know in your heart ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... 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 ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... my eleventh birthday I did not go to school, being taught to read and write and cipher by my father himself. But one day he set me before him on his horse and rode into Shrewsbury, where, after a solemn interview with Mr. Lloyd, the master, I was put into the accidence class at King Edward's famous school. As we rode back, I remember that my father, who was generally ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... made TRUE in its own key; any story can be made FALSE by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style: Otto is made to reel like a drunken - I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher - by the variations of the key. Have you observed that the famous problem of realism and idealism is one purely of detail? Have you seen my 'Note on Realism' in Cassell's MAGAZINE OF ART; and 'Elements of ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... full-grown woman, over twenty-one years of age, mistress of my own acts, and no longer a ward of yours. I can do as I like, and neither Dr. Wade nor anybody else can prevent me. He may ADVICE me not to go: he has no power to ORDER me. I'm my father's heiress, and a person of independent means. I've been a cipher too long. From to-day I take my affairs wholly into my own hands. I 'll go round at once and see your lawyer, your banker, your agent, your tradesmen, and tell them that henceforth I draw my own rents, I receive my own dividends, I pay my ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... my sense of honor to politics, that both of them, being professional soldiers and consequently without freedom of choice, need not take the same point of view as a responsible Foreign Minister. During our conversation I was informed that a telegram from Ems, in cipher, if I recollect rightly, of about 200 "groups," was being deciphered. When the copy was handed to me it showed that Abeken had drawn up and signed the telegram at his Majesty's command, and I read it out to my guests,[36] ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... 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 as ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... planning to get the picture out of Italy occupied his attention. An excellent idea presented itself: some furniture ordered by his firm should carry it in a sofa, and his partner should be advised by cipher letter to remove the picture. J. B. Randolph would buy it, without doubt—no need to tell him how it came into Shayne & Co.'s hands. They could swear they bought it in London. Plausible stories of masterpieces discovered ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... professionals; the serious business is, that in this country no child, how poor soever it may be, shall have the slightest let or hindrance in the equal chance with every other child to learn to read, and write, and cipher, ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... 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
... thing was to get off this message, so he sat down to work out the cipher known only to himself and ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... again. Readers who have any tincture of Psychology know how much is to be inferred from this; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle |
