跳舞的小人（20）

“Having once recognised, however, that the symbols stood for letters, and having applied the rules which guide us in all forms of secret writings, the solution was easy enough. The first message submitted to me was so short that it was impossible for me to do more than to say with some confidence that the symbol

Picture of a single dancing man

stood for E. As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabet, and it predominates to so marked an extent that even in a short sentence one would expect to find it most often. Out of fifteen symbols in the first message four were the same, so it was reasonable to set this down as E. It is true that in some cases the figure was bearing a flag and in some cases not, but it was probable from the way in which the flags were distributed that they were used to break the sentence up into words. I accepted this as a hypothesis, and noted that E was represented by

Picture of a single dancing man

“But now came the real difficulty of the inquiry. The order of the English letters after E is by no means well marked, and any preponderance which may be shown in an average of a printed sheet may be reversed in a single short sentence. Speaking roughly, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and L are the numerical order in which letters occur; but T, A, O, and I are very nearly abreast of each other, and it would be an endless task to try each combination until a meaning was arrived at. I, therefore, waited for fresh material. In my second interview with Mr. Hilton Cubitt he was able to give me two other short sentences and one message, which appeared—since there was no flag—to be a single word. Here are the symbols. Now, in the single word I have already got the two E's coming second and fourth in a word of five letters. It might be ‘sever,’ or ‘lever,’ or ‘never.’ There can be no question that the latter as a reply to an appeal is far the most probable, and the circumstances pointed to its being a reply written by the lady. Accepting it as correct, we are now able to say that the symbols

Picture of three dancing men

stand respectively for N, V, and R.

“可是，现在最难的问题来了。因为，除了Ｅ以外，英文字母出现次数的顺序并不很清楚。这种顺序，在平常一页印出的文字里和一个短句子里，可能正相反。大致说来，字母按出现次数排列的顺序是Ｔ，Ａ，Ｏ，Ｉ，Ｎ，Ｓ，Ｈ，Ｒ，Ｄ，Ｌ；但是Ｔ，Ａ，Ｏ，Ｉ，出现的次数几乎不相上下。要是把每一种组合都试一遍，直到得出一个意思来，那会是一项无止境的工作。所以，我只好等来了新材料再说。希尔顿·丘比特先生第二次来访的时候，果真给了我另外两个短句子和似乎只有一个单词的一句话，就是这几个不带小旗的符号。在这个由五个符号组合的单字中，我找出了第二个和第四个都是Ｅ。这个单词可能是ｓｅｖｅｒ（切断），也可能是ｌｅｖｅｒ（杠杆），或者ｎｅｖｅｒ（决不）。毫无疑问，使用末了这个词来回答一项请求的可能一性一极大，而且种种情况都表明这是丘比特太太写的答复。假如这个判断正确，我们现在就可以说，三个符号分别代表ＮＶ、和Ｒ。