Now it is perfectly easy to introduce abbreviations for each of the common short words and terminations, and equally easy to baffle the decipherer's reliance thereon by inserting meaningless symbols to separate the words; by employing two signs for a common letter, or so arranging your cipher that no one shall without extreme difficulty know which marks stand for single and which for several combined letters, where one letter ends and another begins." After some debate, Colonel A---- wrote down and handed me two lines in a cipher whose character at once struck me as very remarkable.
"I grant," said I, "that these hieroglyphics might well puzzle a more practised decipherer than myself.

Still, I can point out even here a clue which might help detection.

There occur, even in these two lines, three or four symbols which, from their size and complication, are evidently abbreviations.

Again, the distinct forms are very few, and have obviously been made to serve for different letters by some slight alterations devised upon a fixed rule.

In a word, the cipher has been constructed upon a general principle; and though it may take a long time to find out what that principle is, it affords a clue which, carefully followed out, will probably lead to detection." "You have perceived," said Colonel A----, "a fact which it took me very long to discover.