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But,
with the cipher now before us, all difficulty was removed by the
signature. The pun upon the word 'Kidd' is appreciable in no other
language than the English. But for this consideration I should
have begun my attempts with the Spanish and French, as the tongues
in which a secret of this kind would most naturally have been
written by a pirate of the Spanish main. As it was, I assumed the
cryptograph to be English.
"You observe there are no divisions between the words. Had there
been divisions the task would have been comparatively easy. In
such cases I should have commenced with a collation and analysis of
the shorter words, and, had a word of a single letter occurred, as
is most likely, (a or I, for example,) I should have considered the
solution as assured. But, there being no division, my first step
was to ascertain the predominant letters, as well as the least
frequent. Counting all, I constructed a table thus:

Of the character 8 there are 33.
; " 26.
4 " 19.
+) " 16.
* " 13.


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