ment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid
his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has
nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to
mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have
something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of
conjuring trick, but it is all the more interesting because he fully
explains it.

Cryptographs are systems of secret writing. The letter _e_ is
represented by some strange character, perhaps the figure 8. In "The
Gold-Bug" _t_ is a semicolon and _h_ is 4, so that; 48 means _the_.
Sometimes the letter _e_ is represented by several signs, any one of
which the writer may use; and perhaps the word _the_, which occurs so
often, is represented by a single character, like _x_. Often, too, the
words are run together, so that at first sight you cannot tell where
one word begins and another ends.

Solving a cryptograph is like doing a mathematical problem, and Poe
was very clever at it.

He published a series of articles on "Cryptography" or systems of
secret writing, in _Alexander's Weekly Messenger_, and challenged any
reader to send in a cipher which he could not translate into ordinary
language. Hundreds were sent to him, and he solved them all, though it
took up a great deal of his time.

In the same line with this was another feat of his. Dickens's story,
"Barnaby Rudge," was coming out in parts from week to week, as a
serial publication. From the first chapters Poe calculated what the
outcome of the plot would be, and published it in the _Saturday
Evening Post_. He guessed the story so accurately that Dickens was
greatly surprised and asked him if he were the devil.

Again at a later date Poe wrote a remarkable story, "The Mystery of
Marie Roget." A young girl had been murdered in New York. The
newspapers were full of accounts of the crime, but the police could
get no clew to the murderers. In Poe's story he wrote out exactly what
happened on the night of the murder, and explained the whole thing, as
if he were an expert detective. Afterward, by the confessions of two
of the participants, it was proved that his solution of the mystery
was almost exactly the truth.

"The Gold-Bug" was not published until sometime later, but it was as
editor of _Graham's Magazine_ that Poe first became known as a writer
of detective stories. One of the most famous is "The Murders of the
Rue Morgue."