ly to my result. But I must tell you the result of
my examination. After counting up the recurrence of all the letters
on more than two hundred pages of standard authors, I made out an
average of the times of their recurrence, and I have the paper here
on which I wrote the average down."

And Miss Krieff drew from her pocket a paper which she unfolded and
showed to Gualtier. On it was the following:

AVERAGE OF LETTERS.

E.....222 times per page. N.....90 times per page.
T.....162 times per page. L.....62 times per page.
A.....120 times per page. D.....46 times per page.
H.....110 times per page. C.....42 times per page.
I..J..109 times per page. U..V..36 times per page.
S.....104 times per page. B.....36 times per page.
O.....100 times per page. W.....30 times per page.
R.....100 times per page. G.....30 times per page.

"The rest," said Miss Krieff, "occur on the average less than thirty
times on a page, and so I did not mark them. 'F,' 'P,' and 'K' may be
supposed to occur more frequently than some others; but they do not.

"'E,' then," she continued, "is the letter of first importance in the
English language. 'A,' and 'T,' and 'H,' are the next ones. Now there
are some little words which include these letters, such as 'the.'
'And' is another word which may be discovered and deciphered, it is
of such frequent occurrence. If these words only can be found, it is
a sign at least that one is on the right track. There are also
terminations which seem to me peculiar to the English language; such
as 'ng,' 'ing,' 'ed,' 'ly,' and so on. At any rate, from my studies
of the Italian, French, and German, and from my knowledge of
Hindustani, I know that there are no such terminations in any of the
words of those languages. So you see," concluded Miss Krieff, with a
quiet smile, "the simple principle on which I acted."

"Your genius is marvelously acute!" exclaimed Gualtier, in
undisguised admiration. "You speak of your principle as a _simple_
one, but it is more than I have been able to arrive at."

"Men," said Miss Krieff, "reason too much. You have been imagining
all sorts of languages in which this may have been written. Now,
women go by intuitions. I acted in that way."

"Intuitions!" exclaimed Gualtier. "You have reasoned out this thing
in a way which might have done honor to Bacon. You have laid down a
great principle as a foundation, and have gone earnestly to work
building up your theory. Champollion