"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your reach! You have no ambition but to strum that banjo, roar ridiculous songs, fuss up like a tailor's dummy, and pester your comrades, or drag them down to Jerry's for the eats! You won't be earnest, you Human Cipher, Before you entered Bannister, you formed your ideas and ideals of campus life from colored posters, moving-pictures, magazine stories, and stage dramas like 'Brown of Harvard"; you have surely lived up, or down, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... silently to myself,) that I acknowledge no such tiger for a friend of mine. 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
... down on Miss Tonk's card the small purple cipher that stood for hm—hm. "I will make enquiries about her address," ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... thing," Southwick said. "We got instructions to pack up a pretty strange assortment of supplies for the Scorpius and that's all I know. The order was in special cipher, though, so we're ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... nothing to 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' ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... myself useful to my employer; but it was no easy matter to do this at first, because he had such a dread of my awkwardness that he would never let me touch any of his apparatus. I was always left to stand like a cipher beside him whilst he lectured; and I had regularly the mortification of hearing him conclude his lecture with, 'Now, gentlemen and ladies, I will not detain you any longer from what, I am sensible, is much better ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... this particular instance the prestige was heightened by the fact that she was also a queen. Marie Antoinette was then at the zenith of her beauty and power. The timid, shrinking dauphiness, forced to the arms of an unwilling husband, himself a mere cipher, had expanded into a fascinating woman, reigning triumphantly over the court and the affections of her vacillating spouse. The birth, after years of wedlock, of several children completed her conquest and gave her the dominion she craved, and she now threw her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... street duel the local representative of the Associated Press had his story on the wire, and at eight-thirty next morning T. Morgan Carey, in his club at Los Angeles, read the glad tidings. By nine o'clock a cipher telegram from Carey was being clicked off to his tool in the General Land Office at Washington, instructing him to expedite the listing of the applications of Bob McGraw's clients for ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 not the policy of the ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... discovering that Shakespeare was not himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not with generalities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, covered with hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher which he thinks the plays contain—such sample page is certainly a marvel, even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and "Looking Backward." A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanation makes marvelous ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... me the life of the damned. You know well what bitter cup you have made me drink. If I have stood to the world as my father's heir, you have eaten up the inheritance If my father's house was mine, I was no more than a cipher in it. I have had the shadow, and you the substance. You have ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... declaring, "that the minister did hold without control the unparticipated and entire administration, with all the powers annexed to that government,—the Nabob being, as he ever must be in the hands of some person, a mere cipher in his" (the minister's). And having thus stated the subordination of the minister to the Resident, and the subordination of the Nabob to the minister, he did naturally declare, "that the first ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be allowed to pay for himself by working overtime, his master readily agreed,—for it promised more work to be done, for which he could allow the slave just what he pleased. Of course, he knew now that when the black man began to cipher this state of affairs would be changed; but it would mean such an increase of profit from the outside, that he could afford to give up his own little peculations. Anyway, it would be many years before the slave could ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... patience." "I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire," he goes on, his wrath rising as he writes; "a good text always deserves a fair margent, but as for a woman who lives but to ape the newest court- fashions, I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing; fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. To speak moderately, I truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the lieutenant. "It was the warning in cipher or code. I didn't think they would neglect ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... to assail him, and when they did, he hoped for the best. For a painter's portfolio is, after all, hardly less confidential than a diary, and may be on occasion almost as compromising, in spite of the fact that the records it contains are written in cipher. ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of the year, the royal family, and the most confidential of their servants, were much employed in secret correspondence with the absent princes and nobility, and with the foreign Courts. Some of these letters were in cipher, and were copied by persons who knew nothing whatever of the meaning of what they were writing. The queen wrote almost all day long, and spent a part of the nights in reading. Poor lady! She ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... mumbled John-James, "that happen later Vassie could go to what they do call a boarding school to Plymouth church town, seen' as the money won't be Ishmael's yet awhile.... Only she must learn to cipher and make nadlework flowers afore go, or the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... ter read de Bible. Dey wuz a free nigger boy in de settlement w'at wuz monst'us smart, en could write en cipher, en wuz alluz readin' books er papers. En Dave had hi'ed dis free boy fer ter l'arn 'im how ter read. Hit wuz 'g'in de law, but co'se none er de niggers didn' say nuffin ter de w'ite folks 'bout it. Howsomedever, one day Mars Walker—he ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... after playing about the eccentricities of cipher, changed in the Seventeenth Century to easily read initials, sometimes interlaced, sometimes apart. Later on it became the mode to weave the entire name. An example of these is the two letters C of Charles de Comans ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 30th July, I dined with Stewart, and, leaving his mess-tent at an early hour, I retired to my own quarters, and wrote out the following telegram in cipher, but, before despatching it, I showed it to Stewart, for, although I knew that his views were in accord with mine, I could not with propriety have sent it without ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... coolly, if he can, the next bullet-wound in his leg. He will perceive a puncture which will probably, when traced around the edge and carefully copied, present that circular form generally assigned to a—cipher. This represents, we believe, with tolerable accuracy, what the anti-actionists and reactionists propose to give the soldier as a recompense for that leg. For so truly as we live, so true is it that there is not one anti-Emancipationist in the North who is not opposed to settling the army or ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 race ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... I was his superior in the Priesthood, if not in experience and ability, looked upon me as a cipher, fit for nothing. The rough treatment and slights that I received from him were more than humiliating to a man of fine feelings and a spirit such as I possessed. I said nothing to him, but I poured out my soul in secret prayer to my Heavenly Father, asking Him to open the door for ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... condition of school children is our best index to community health, who is to read the index? Unless the story is told in a language that does not require a secret code or cipher, unless some one besides the physician can read it, we shall be a very long time learning the health needs of even our largest cities, and until doomsday learning the health needs of small towns and rural districts. Fortunately the more important signs can be easily ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... 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 preservation ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... how long you've been roarin' At this infernal rate; I wonder if all you've been pourin' Could be cipher'd on a slate. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... neither been of a slight nor an agreeable kind. I made it a rule to read everything that has been written respecting Napoleon, and I have had to decipher many of his autograph documents, though no longer so familiar with his scrawl as formerly. I say decipher, because a real cipher might often be much more readily understood than the handwriting of Napoleon. My own notes, too, which were often very hastily made, in the hand I wrote in my youth, have sometimes also ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... no other than the celebrated "Cipher Correspondence between Grumkow and Reichenbach;" Grumkow covertly instructing his slave Reichenbach what the London news shall be: Reichenbach answering him, To hear is to obey! Correspondence much noised of in the modern Prussian Books; and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... cheery and expansive mood, and found something very fascinating not merely in the fact of the majority, but even in the form of it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures; one felt it might be a sort of motto or cipher. In the great book of seals and cloudy symbols there is just such a thundering repetition. Six hundred and sixty-six was the Mark of the Beast. Five hundred and fifty-five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant tribune and citizen. A number so symmetrical ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... down the Coalition ministry; it was the most insolent experiment ever made on the constitution—a compound of republican daring and despotic power. It would have made the king a cipher, and parliament a slave. The exclusive patronage of India would have enabled the minister to corrupt the legislature. The corruption of the legislature would have made the minister irresponsible: the constitution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the cable cipher and read it to himself again. If Mr. Hunt had known its contents he need not have waited for Philip to telegraph "no" ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... staff in use among the Lacedaemonians for writing cipher despatches. A strip of leather or paper was wound round the 'skytal,' on which the required message was written lengthwise, so that when unrolled it became unintelligible; the recipient abroad had a staff of the same thickness and pattern, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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 we ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... seemed superbly attired. She saw it. "My dress has changed a little," she said, "and I also; but not to you. Hang the bag over your other shoulder, that I may see your face. You say so little that if one does not look at you you are an uncomprehended cipher." Waldo changed the bag, and they walked on side by side. "You have improved," she said. "Do you know that I have sometimes wished to see you while I was away; not often, ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... a cipher until newspapers are abolished by law," said Claude Vignon. "You are making progress hourly," he added, addressing Finot. "You are a modern order of Jesuits, lacking the creed, the fixed idea, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... refusal of Richard and Susan Talbot to allow their Cicely to assume the part of Queen Elizabeth. They had been dismayed at her doing so in child's play, and since she could read fluently, write pretty well, and cipher a little, the good mother had decided to put a stop to this free association with the boys at the castle, and to keep her at home to study needlework and housewifery. As to her acting with boys before the assembled households, the proposal seemed to them absolutely ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inches was, therefore, the length of his proposed stage, or, more properly speaking, his platform, and he seated himself, with a look of perplexity on his face and a remarkably small piece of lead-pencil in his mouth, to figure up the grand total of inches. He could multiply the cipher easily enough, for he was positive that the answer would be the same, however large the multiplier might be; but the question of how much eight times three ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... 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
... her some good, but Mr. Bond thought "she knew enough already. She could read, write, and cipher, and didn't she know Pilgrim's Progress from beginning to end; that was all he had ever learned, and hadn't he gone through life ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... crown and anchor, and his Majesty's cipher on the appointments of the dead officer, he became convinced of our quality, and changed his tone—"Es verdad, son de la marina Englesa. But, gentlemen, were there not three ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of paper torn from a blank-book and looked at them under an electric light. "This Syro-Phoenician writing needs what it can't get out here," he said, after a half-minute's pause. "A cipher requires a code, and a code means sitting down. Aren't you cold? You are. Come over here and we'll have some tea and work it out together." And before protest could be made they were in a hotel across the street and at a table on which a shaded light permitted a closer examination of ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... many small latticed windows, and thatched with straw. The main-door bore another scutcheon, of newer stone than the rest of the house, quartering the arms of St. Martin (azure, nine billets or) over a device of two hearts tied together with a cipher formed by the letters L. and M. This doorway opened into a small hall, in front of which was a stair-case of polished oak. On either side of the hall were low-ceiled parlours wainscotted with dark wood, beams of which supported the ceilings. The floor of the room to the right was paved with ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... shrill laugh, that I shuddered to hear it, and I fell a-crying. "But," she continued, "I am going, I trust, where a key will be given me for this cipher." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... was to get off this message, so he sat down to work out the cipher known only to himself and "Specs." ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... is possible that the writer of it did not arrange the letters on this principle of alphabetical order, but on some other, and thus concealed another meaning in it: for this is so improbable [especially when the cipher contains a number of words] as to seem incredible. But they who observe how many things regarding the magnet, fire, and the fabric of the whole world, are here deduced from a very small number of principles, though they deemed ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... As to that pincushion made of crimson satin, ornamented with gold beads and frilled with thread-lace, I had the same right to know it as to know the screens—I had made it myself. Rising with a start from the bed, I took the cushion in my hand and examined it. There was the cipher "L. L. B." formed in gold beds, and surrounded with an oval wreath embroidered in white silk. These were the initials of my godmother's ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... cipher which I now send to you, on the slip of paper enclosed, is an antidote to that one of the two poisons known to you and to me by the fanciful name which you suggested ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... sundown, the last batch of sheep were fleeced and smitten,[Smitten. Marked with the cipher of the owner in a mixture mostly of tar.] and turned on to the hillside; and Charlotte, leaning over the wall, watched them wander contentedly up the fell, with their lambs trotting beside them. Grandfather and the squire had gone into the house; Ducie was calling her from the open door; she ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... discovered that it was a horrid roaring river she thought she 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
... 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 to serve him, the more the distance between them seemed ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our memory so ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... release and that their children should be allowed to visit them; nor did they conceal their disapproval of this rough treatment.[5] It is claimed that the new Governor has sent to the sovereigns some letters in the handwriting of the Admiral, but in cipher, in which the latter summoned his brother the Adelantado, who was at that time absent with his soldiers, to hasten back and repel force with force, in case the Governor sought to use violence. The Adelantado preceded his soldiers, and the Governor seized ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... a cipher message," said Nan, smiling. "Patty is so fond of puzzles and secret languages, I wasn't sure but it might mean 'All is ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... instance, that Lord Dunstable was just a cipher? Not at all. He's the real authority here, and when he puts his foot down Rachel always gives in. But of course she's stood in the way of ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... soon were near enough to exchange signals. I may mention here that radio-aerograms are seldom if ever used in war time, or for the transmission of secret dispatches at any time, for as often as one nation discovers a new cipher, or invents a new instrument for wireless purposes its neighbours bend every effort until they are able to intercept and translate the messages. For so long a time has this gone on that practically every possibility of wireless communication has ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in this case it contributes so little to the general amusement; for really Theobald's intense flirtation with Lady Bolsover, is the flattest piece of dull indecorum that ever met my virtuous eyes. They are dull, these people—keep him from quadrupeds, and Theobald is a cipher; and Lady B. has little more than the few ideas which she gets sent over with her dresses from Paris. I know it is mauvais ton to cry them down—but I cannot help it. My sincerity will ruin me some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... shall not have in his possession at any time or place, or use or operate, any aircraft or wireless apparatus, or any form of signaling device, or any form of cipher code or any paper, document or book written or printed in cipher, or in which ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... "Office cipher; I was forgetting. 'Elephant' means 'Seriously ill and unable to attend to duty.' Meredith is one of the partners in my firm in ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... promotion to the rank of sub-director. His routine habits then became great experience; his manners and his silence concealed his lack of education, and his absolute nullity was a recommendation, for a cipher was needed. The government was afraid of displeasing both parties in the Chamber by selecting a man from either side; it therefore got out of the difficulty by resorting to the rule of seniority. That is how Thuillier became sub-director. Mademoiselle Thuillier, knowing ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... gathered from the reference books, and thus he was saved from humiliation and discouragement, and at the same time, he was stimulated to making independent researches in the school and public libraries. Each class of honor pupil could whisper, go out, or go to the blackboards to draw or cipher without asking permission. The high sense of honor was thus developed which is so essential to ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... February, 1796, Tone, who had sailed from Belfast the previous June, arrived at Havre from New York, possessed of a hundred guineas and some useful letters of introduction. One of these letters, written in cipher, was from the French Minister at Philadelphia to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Lacroix; another was to the American Minister in France, Mr. Monroe, afterwards President of the United States, by whom he was most kindly received, and wisely advised, on reaching Paris. Lacroix ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... that you have come thus early, for I want a trusty man to go forthwith into the west country. What I wish you to do cannot be written, but you will take this ring;" and he took one from the little finger of his right hand, on the gem of which his cipher was graven, and gave it to my grandfather. "On showing it to Lord Boyd, whom you will find at the Dean Castle, near Kilmarnock, he will thereby know that you are specially trusted of me. The message whereof you are the bearer is to this effect,—That the Lords of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... chance 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
... 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, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... 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 walls ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... cities of Judea was made by Julius Caesar, not as here to Antipater, but to Hyrcanas, Antiq. B. XIV. ch. 8. sect. 5, has hardly an appearance of a contradiction; Antipater being now perhaps considered only as Hyrcanus's deputy and minister; although he afterwards made a cipher of Hyrcanus, and, under great decency of behavior to him, took ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... later Democrates was not drinking wine at his betrothal feast, but sending this cipher letter by a swift and ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... of these intrigues, 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
... 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 ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... ANTONIO MIRABELLI. Then followed a grand dinner given by the municipality of the city in a hall of the hotel, which was now inaugurated and was named the Vega Hall, and was on this occasion ornamented with the royal cipher, the Swedish and Italian flags, &c. In the evening there was a gala representation at San Carlo, where the members of the Expedition scattered among the different boxes were saluted with repeated loud cries of "Bravo!"—On Tuesday the 17th the Committee had arranged an excursion to Lake ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... suppose, but I'm bound to say that this tactless speech nettled me not a little. People are always nettling me like that. Giving me to understand, I mean to say, that in their opinion Bertram Wooster is a mere cipher and that the only member of the household with brains ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... strength, and not yet bowed down or stiffened by the constant toil of a labourer's daily life. In these matters, however, he had rivals in the village; but in intellectual accomplishments he was unrivalled. He was full of learning according to the village standard, could write and cipher well, was fond of reading such books as came in his way, and spoke his native English almost without an accent. He is one-and-twenty at the time when our story takes him up; a thoroughly skilled labourer, the best hedger and ditcher in the parish; and, when his blood is up, he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... penitentiary for such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of self-degradation. Let every man remember, that, though he may be a nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by ten when it is placed on the right side of whatever unit for the time represents the cause of truth and justice. What we need is a thorough awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how the still and stealthy ashes of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. Why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and she my wife—that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she was, being a woman of some education, his mother had taught him to read and write and cipher—not that he was a great adept at any of those arts, but he possessed the groundwork, which was an important matter; and he did his best to keep up his knowledge by reading sign-boards, looking into ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... doublet of crimson cloth, with the crown, the Royal Cipher G. R., and a wreath of laurel embroidered in gold, both on its back and front; a linen ruff, well plaited, round my neck, sleeves puffed with black velvet, trunk-hose of scarlet, rosettes in my slashed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... a 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 esprit. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... brow as unabashed as man may wear In seeking his? Ah! lack of candor here Works more regrets, for woman and for man, Than we can reckon. Let but woman feel That in the social scheme she's not a cipher, The remedy, be sure, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... write good English. The learning of anything, especially of arithmetic and grammar, by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt. With the public, ability to recite the rules of such subjects as those went farther than any actual demonstration of the power to cipher ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... profession. A man who cannot hold his temper in leash, and who flies emotional signals from every feature in his face, has slender chance of success in an avocation which demands that body and soul, heart and mind, abjure even secret signal service, and deal only in cipher. The youthful naivete with which you permit your countenance to reflect your sentiments, renders it quite easy for me to comprehend the nature of your feeling for my ward. For some weeks your interest ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... drawing-room, lest he should follow her farther and give her no place to retreat to; then she sat down with a weary air, taking off her gloves, rubbing her hand over her forehead, and making his presence as much of a cipher as possible. But he sat, too, and not far from her—just in front, where to avoid looking at him must have the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... this," he said. "It's some sort of a note, written in cipher, I should judge. It is signed ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... vindicated the justice of this reception by publishing in that year a satire called Puritan and Papist. Upon the retirement of the queen to Paris, he was one of her suite, and as secretary to Viscount St. Albans he conducted the correspondence in cipher between the queen ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the stubborn mind to have mercy on the lacerated body, but without effect. His own wayward heart gave him the key to read the cipher of this man's life. "A noble nature ruined," said he to himself. "What is the secret of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... I die, the scandal will survive, And be an eye-sore in my golden coat; Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive, To cipher me how fondly I did dote; That my posterity, sham'd with the note, Shall curse my bones, and hold it for no sin To wish that I their father had ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sports, and manifesting an unusual repugnance to the confinement and labors of the school-room. He has since declared that the only books he remembers using at school were the New Testament and the spelling-book. The result was, that he merely learned to read, write, and cipher, and that imperfectly. He was passionately fond of the water, and was never so well pleased as when his father allowed him to assist in sailing his boat. He was also a famous horseman from his earliest childhood, and even now recalls with ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... to a 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 ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... (xvii. 9) there was extant a collection of Caesar's letters to C. Oppius and Cornelius Balbus, written in a kind of cipher. (See Suetonius, Caesar, 56.) Two letters of Caesar to Oppius and Balbus are extant in the collection of Cicero's letters (Ad Atticum, ix. 8, 16), both expressed with admirable brevity and clearness. One of them also shows his good ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... taught him to recite poetry, to draw maps and to make use of arithmetic, 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 ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... which follow, setting forth separate details, are like rooms within the house, and—I have just come upon the coincidence with a pleasant start such as might be felt by the discoverer of some complex and important cipher—as there are twenty-seven of the numbered paragraphs in the Declaration, so there are twenty-seven rooms in Monticello. Last of all there are two little phrases in the Declaration (the phrases stating that we shall hold ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... 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 of pins and an old coral bracelet." As for the page, he rushed ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a clear meaning, and in which it is nevertheless said that the meaning is veiled and obscure, that it is hidden, so that we might read the letter without seeing it, and interpret it without understanding it, what must we think but that here is a cipher with a double meaning, and the more so if we find obvious contradictions in the literal meaning? The prophets have clearly said that Israel would be always loved by God, and that the law would be eternal; and they ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... wondering whether Bryce had ever lived amongst the volatile Latins on the other side of the Pacific. Come to think of it the one man I had seen closely had been a dark type. It was just barely possible that Bryce had somehow tangled himself in something of the kind. But then that cipher business—I was fully convinced by now that it was some original kind of cryptogram—rather pointed the other way. One of the things I had noticed had been a L sign, and anything dealing with any of the Latin Republics would almost assuredly have been written ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... said Legrand, "the solution is by no means so difficult as you might be lead to imagine from the first hasty inspection of the characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher—that is to say, they convey a meaning; but then, from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... large, flat unhewn stones, some six to seven feet high, and the Angami-Nagas of the extreme north of British India set up extensive alignments of menhirs, similar to those of France. Inscriptions in the old Irish cipher writing, known as ogham, prove that megalithic monuments were erected in Ireland after the time of St. Patrick; and, as we have already remarked, some of the Breton menhirs are surrounded by crosses. In India, too, we find the symbol of the Christian faith, and in 1867, were discovered ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... cipher dispatch to London if you like, Mr. Hargreave," said the Minister Petkoff, as we sat over our cigars. "The documents will be all signed at the Cabinet meeting at noon to-morrow. In exchange for this loan raised in London, all the contracts for the new quick-firing ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... Walsingham; were deciphered by the art of Philips, his clerk; and copies taken of them. Walsingham employed another artifice, in order to obtain full insight into the plot: he subjoined to a letter of Mary's a postscript in the same cipher; in which he made her desire Babington to inform her of the names of the conspirators. The indiscretion of Babington furnished Walsingham with still another means of detection, as well as of defence. That gentlemen had caused a picture to be drawn, where he himself was represented ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... to his words that the other heirs began to feel that Massin had let Bongrand deceive him. The tax-collector, a fat little man, as insignificant as a tax-collector should be, and as much of a cipher as a clever woman could wish, hereupon annihilated his co-heir, Massin, with the words:—"Didn't ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... view-point. But I can't quite succeed. There has always been a touch of the satyric in Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward Peter's weekly letter to my boy. He has even intimated that they were written in a new kind of Morse, the inference being that they were intended to carry messages in cipher to eyes other than Dinkie's. But Peter is much too honest a man for any such resort to subterfuge. And Dinky-Dunk has always viewed with a hostile eye the magazines and books and toys which big-hearted Peter has showered out on us. Peter ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... cosmopolite is a cipher, worse than a cipher; outside of nationality there is neither art, nor truth, nor life; there ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... an incredulously thin and sallow-faced man of about forty. Although this man spoke with an English accent and exile seemed to have foreigneered him in both appearance and outlook, his knowledge of America was active and intimate. He passed over to the detective two despatches in cipher, handed him a confidential list of Hong Kong addresses, gave him certain information as to Macao, and an hour later conducted him down the river to the steamer which started that ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... confidence. Only, if we can find out Moxon's methods, we can arrange to use them ourselves and send noos in his name which isn't quite so genooine. Every word he dispatches goes straight to the Grand High Secret General Staff, and old Hindenburg and Ludendorff put towels round their heads and cipher it out. We want to encourage them to go on doing it. We'll arrange to send true stuff that don't matter, so as they'll continue to trust him, and a few selected falsehoods that'll matter like hell. It's a game you can't play for ever, but with ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... memoranda, certain writings in cipher, others in foreign characters, pieces of drawings, maps and the like, all of which I destroyed. It contained also, in thin foreign notes, a sum large beyond the belief of what an ordinary officer would carry into battle; and this money, ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... increased by a fourth in 1732,) though in itself a trifling work, had one vast consequence. It drew after it swarms of libels and lampoons, levelled almost exclusively at Pope, although the cipher of the joint authors stood entwined upon the title-page. These libels in their turn produced a second reaction; and, by stimulating Pope to effectual anger, eventually drew forth, for the everlasting admiration of posterity, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much. Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in some of the fine restaurants in ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... only a more limited sphere than older members: and all the rules and regulations and arrangements of the family should have a reference to this point. So long as a child is reckoned to be a mere cipher in creation, or at most, as of no more practical importance, till the arrival of his twenty-first birth day, or some other equally arbitrary period, than our domestic animals—that is, of just sufficient consequence to be fed, and caressed, and fondled, and ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... degree. I do not want the boys and girls of our high schools taught, or rather directed in their upward development, by mere specialists—doctors of philosophy, who know everything about nothing, and nothing about everything. Nor do I want them directed by men and women who are obliged to "cipher on page twenty while the class is working on page nineteen." But I do want them directed by men and women who are thoroly acquainted with the subjects which they teach, and who know how to handle the same; but especially by men and women of broad, liberal culture, men and women ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Galin it is really amazing that such a bungling, unscientific way of expressing silence should have been tolerated so long. Compare these "pot-hooks and trammels," dotted and double-dotted, with Galin's symbol of silence, the cipher (0)! This is all, and yet it expresses every length of rest, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... "are you a cipher in this game? A barony hangs on this. Are you as stubborn and unruly as the head of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... children run wild!" she said to herself, "and Pennie getting a great girl, too. As for Miss Grey, she's a perfect cipher, and doesn't look after them a bit. If they were ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... qualified him to dig graves and open the house of worship, but not to teach the young. However, he did teach school quite a number of years, and some of his pupils called him "Old Wooden Leg"—a fact that confirms the story of his having but one leg. He could "read, write and cipher" possibly, for that day, but beyond that he made no pretensions. Yet, that was the best school George could have ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... holy person, has a more difficult and engrossing occupation than the woman of fashion, in a country where the distinctions of rank are so purely factitious as in ours. Miss Sandford's time was now her own; she was accountable to no supervisor. Her brother was a cipher. He did not venture to intrude upon her, except at seasons when she was at leisure, and in a humor to be bored by him. Perhaps she looked back regretfully, but, as far as could be told by her manner, she carried herself proudly, with the air of one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... of Proceedings in the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, edited by Mr. Bruce for the Camden Society in 1845, are "Notes written in a Cipher," which Mr. Bruce gives in the hope that the ingenuity of some reader will discover their meaning. I venture ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... welcomed me with a gay and genuine friendship, and as Sandy and I made our salutations to her I saw Nancy at some little distance from us, literally surrounded by fatuous cipher-faced youths, who stood in some awe before her misty beauty and reputed power. There was pride in me that the girl was mine, a pride which Sandy Carmichael shared with me, and as Hugh Pitcairn crossed the long room to salute her gravely but with marked respect, I saw ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... estimates of seconds, minutes, hours, days. And our constructive faculty can be brought into play to conceive the larger tracts of duration—a century, or a hundred centuries. Nay, by our arithmetical powers we can put down in cipher, or conceive symbolically (which is the meagrest of all conceptions) millions of millions of centuries; these being after all but compounds of our alphabet of enduring or repeated sensations and thoughts. We can suppose this arithmetical process to operate upon past ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain |
