.V ).C L.
.<.[-] )7 ^V C 7 )L.L > No two alike.

Astonishing! Thirty-two words of English and only one the in the whole?
Could it be that the cipher was in a foreign language?
The preponderance of i's so out of proportion to the other vowels had already given me this fear, but the lack of thes seemed positively to indicate it.

Yet I must dig deeper before accepting defeat.
Th is a combination of letters which Poe says occurs so often in our language that they can easily be picked out in a cipher of this length.
How many times can a conjunction of two similar characters be found in the lines before us..>.[-] occurs three times, which is often enough, perhaps, to establish the fact that they stand for th.

Do I find them joined with a third character in the list of possible thes?
Yes..> [-] which would seem to fix both the th and the e.
But I have grown wary and must make myself sure.

Do I find a word in which this combination of.