enable them to carry on their system. But, as a proof of the capability of the Bengal Cavalry to sustain themselves even on foreign service under the greatest difficulties, I would mention a circum stance which occurred to my regiment in the Abyssinian Campaign when Government had taken the matter of self-sustenance out of our hands. On our arrival at Antālo, the half-way depôt en route to Magdala, I received an order to push on by double marches to join Sir Robert Napier at the front, taking with me fifteen. days' rations. On offering my indents to the principal commissariat officer, I was met with the reply, "Impossible we have not the rations to give you!" I represented my orders were imperative, but to no avail; until I suggested that the

commissariat officer should advance me the money and allow me to manage for myself, to which proposal he readily agreed. Dollars were plentiful if food was not. We left with rejoicings on both sides; he saw his way out of a difficulty, and I my way to Magdala, which we reached in good time to join our Chief; and I do not think any corps or department in the force proceeding to Magdala was better provisioned both for horses and men than we were. We procured our supplies day by day, or wherever they were most plentiful, carrying them with us.

I have endeavoured in the above sketch to describe the rise of the Bengal Cavalry from its early days of formation, when the wild dashing horsemen of the early century clustered round James Skinner, through the times of Mahratta and Mahommedan martial fame, down to the present organisation; when, after the lapse of nearly a hundred years, there is no military service more popular-both with the natives, who enlist most willingly, knowing it is a well-paid service, and one where promotion is open to all; and with the English youngster, who remembers that, as a field of distinction, it is rich both in the past and present in well-earned honours.

HUGH GOUGH.

IV.

FROM THE TIME OF GEORGE II. TO THE PRESENT DAY. "Sir, there lies such secrets in this . . . box, which none must know but the King."-The Winter's Tale.

A

VERY ingenious way of sending a secret message, which dates back more than a hundred years, is the "Pack of Cards" cipher, No. 46. A piquet pack of thirty-two cards is used, and the two persons using the cipher previously agree upon a certain arrangement of the cards as regards value and suit. The arrangement as regards value of the cards is fixed by some easily remembered doggerel rhyme, such as that composed for the present illustration :

Thus, the cards are arranged: King, eight, knave, Queen, Ace, seven, nine, ten (see No. 46). The arrangement as to suit may conveniently be in alphabetical order, thus club, diamond, heart, spade (see No. 46). In addition to this understood arrangement of the thirty-two cards, invisible ink was used to write the message upon the backs of the cards (see No. 46), which shows the backs in outline as well as the specified arrangement of the cards-so that the pack could be conveyed from one person to the other without exciting any suspicion that it contained a cipher message.

The sender of the message settles what he wants to write, he then arranges the thirty-two cards in the precise order shown in No. 46 (which is that of the above rhyming formula), and he writes the first thirty-two letters of his message upon the backs of the thirty-two cards, one letter upon each card consecutively, commencing with column 1. and going on with columns II., III. and IV., working down each column. When he has got to the bottom of column Iv. he goes on again with column I., and writes the next thirty-two letters of his message, one on each card as before, underneath the letter already written; and so on until he has written the last letter of his cipher. He then mixes all the cards promiscuously, and the pack is sent to his correspondent, whose first step is to rearrange the cards according to the formula known to him, as set out in No. 46. They will then again be as seen in No. 46, and the decipherer of the message proceeds to write down the letters thus. He makes the invisible ink visible, by aid of heat or by chemicals, and begins at the top of

VOL. VIII.-No. 36.

Copyright by John Holt Schooling.

609

39

column I., taking the top letter from each card. He thus proceeds :-IAMINFULLMARCHTORELIEVEYOUWITHIN (here he reaches the bottom of column IV. and so goes on with the top of column 1. again, taking this time the second letter) THREEDAYSISHALLBEWITHYOUIFTHEENE (here again he gets to the bottom of column iv. and so goes on with the top of column 1., third letter) MYINTHEMEANTIMESHOULDMAKEANASSAU (again he goes back to the top of column 1. but takes now the fourth letter) LTREMEMBER WHATYOUOWETOYOURCOUNTR (but here is the bottom of column Iv., so the decipherer goes on at the top of column 1., but takes the fifth letter) YTOYOURFAMILYANDYOURSELFLIVEWITH (go back again to the top of column I. and take the sixth and last letter) HONOURORDIEWITHGLORY. (All the isolated letters have now been written down from the cards, the last one being the y which was taken from the Queen of Diamonds, column III.). Now, connecting the six lines of letters copied from the cards, the decipherer reads:—

I am in full march to relieve you. Within three days I shall be with vou. If the enemy in the meantime should make an assau | It, remember what you owe to your country, to your family, and yourself. Live with honour or die with glory.

In actual use, this cipher was sometimes made still more difficult for a chance finder of the pack of cards to decipher, by the two correspondents previously agreeing to introduce a specially arranged shuffle of the cards between both the writing and the reading-off of each group of thirty-two letters; to avoid complexity, this element of shuffling has here been omitted. It is obvious, of course, that any pack of playing cards can be used for this cipher; but it may be interesting to mention that the actual size of the beautiful little pack of thirty-two cards used to illustrate No. 46 is barely three-quarters of an inch long, by half an inch wide, by a quarter of an inch thick: the cards and their secret message could therefore be swallowed, on an emergency, by the bearer of the message, without causing him any serious inconvenience. These cards were made by Mr. G. L. Wüst, at Frankfort-on-the-Main; they are here shown in the exact size, and are, I believe, the smallest playing cards in the world.

If a whist pack of fifty-two cards be used, a suitable and easily remembered rhyming-formula is substituted for that which has been given here as a guide to the arrangement of the cards by their respective values; the arrangement as to their suits remains unaltered.

There is much ingenuity shown in this device of the "Pack of Cards" cipher, which is, moreover, simple to decipher if the rhyming-formula that determines the arrangement of the cards be known, but which is very baffling if this be unknown. The difficulty of merely guessing correctly at what is the prearranged order of a pack of thirty-two cards may be appreciated by noting that thirty-two playing cards can be arranged in a number of different orders approximately represented by the figures 263131 followed on the right hand by no fewer than thirty o's: a quantity so large that a row of thirty-six figures is required to show it, and only one out of this very large number will be identical with the arrangement shown in No. 46—upon which depends the solution of the cipher message. If a child born one hundred years ago had started on the task of exhausting these possible arrangements of thirty-two cards as soon as he was born, and had stuck to his task continuously for twenty-four hours a day for one hundred years at the rate of one arrangement per minutewhich is very quick work-he would now, when aged one hundred years, have made only some fifty-two and a half millions of the possible arrangements, and the

number left unmade by him would still require a row of thirty-six figures to express it-so infinitesimal are fifty-two and a half millions of arrangements when compared with the almost infinite number of them which may be made out of thirty-two playing cards; evidently, then, guess-work would not be of much help towards a solution of a message written in the "Pack of Cards" cipher.

The entire population of the world is, approximately, 1500 millions. Let every one of these men, women and children now begin to make the different arrangements of thirty-two cards, and let them work continuously for one hundred years at the rate of one arrangement per minute-deaths and births being suspended for a century for the sake of our experiment-certainly, the work of sorting thirty-two playing cards for one hundred years by the whole population of the world would have exhausted in 1996 some few of the possible arrangements: a mere trifle, however-only 78,840,000,000,000,000-and thus the number left unmade would still require a row of thirty-six figures to express it. Therefore, as the world's population would not be of much use in doing this little piece of work with the thirty-two playing cards shown in No. 46, we will call in astronomy to help us with the sorting of these bits of pasteboard used for the "Pack of Cards" cipher.

There are about one hundred million stars visible at the eyepiece of the Lick telescope: let us assume that each of these stars contains a population one million times larger than that of the earth, and let us set at work all these populations of all these stars. Let us and our helpers in the stars work together at sorting these cards into different arrangements, at the rate of one arrangement per second for each person on the earth or in the stars. At the end of more than fifty-five thousand years from the present time (1896) we should by the aid of the vast populations of these one hundred million stars have exhausted all the possible arrangements of the thirty-two cards shown in No. 46. This is an extraordinary fact to lie so quietly hidden in the simple-looking illustration on page 608, but I do not ask you to be content with my bare statement-here is the calculation set out, so that any one who cares to check my results may do so.

I may suggest that it will be found convenient to make this calculation by the aid of a table of logarithms; although, if the four walls of a spare room be available—and also a pair of steps-the calculation may be worked on the wall-paper with a piece of black chalk or charcoal; the computer descending his ladder step by step and shifting it round the room as he proceeds.

This "Pack of Cards" cipher is in more ways than one a very remarkable device.

The Foreign Office cipher shown in No. 47 is a combination of numerals, letters, and peculiarly formed symbols. The original is much larger than the piece of it here shown, but this piece will suffice to make the method quite clear.

First, there is a choice of five different letters for the representation in a cipher message of each letter of the alphabet. The

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60 × 60 × 24 × 365'25 × 1,500,000,000 × 1,000,000 x 100,000,000

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