Minor key

“ If one whose musical keynote is in the minor is given to periods of marked depression, the Major of the same key should be substituted.
If a person is studying music, and is practicing, it is frequently advisable to put all his exercises in his own key at the beginning of the practice hour, that he may commence his task in this harmonious key, and work out from that. ”

“ The same rules (pages 13 and 15) used in the major for finding the key having the next number of sharps and the key having the next number of flats are applicable in the minor. The order of the letters in both the sharp and flat signatures is the same in the minor as in the major.
A minor has no sharps, the fifth of a is e and has one sharp (f) ”

“ Northwest Smith moved his shoulders against the earth and closed his eyes, breathing so deeply that the gun holstered upon his chest drew tight against its strap as he drank the fragrance of Earth and clover warm in the sun. Here in the hollow of the hills, willow-shaded, pillowed upon clover and the lap of Earth, he let his breath run out in a long sigh and drew one palm across the grass in a caress like a lover's. ”

“ Well, here was Earth beneath him. No longer a green star high in alien skies, but warm soil, new clover so near his face he could see all the little stems and trefoil leaves, moist earth granular at their roots. An ant ran by with waving antennae close beside his cheek. He closed his eyes and drew another deep breath. Better not even look; better to lie here like an animal, absorbing the sun and the feel of Earth blindly, wordlessly.
Now he was not Northwest Smith, scarred outlaw of the spaceways. ”

“ You hold the key to everything. The key, I tell you, the key. I remember, when I used to hang about the biological laboratories at school, eviscerating frogs—crucified with pins, they were, belly upwards, like little green Christs—I remember once, when I was sitting there, quietly poring over the entrails, in came the laboratory boy and said to the stinks usher: ‘Please, sir, may I have the key of the Absolute?’ And, would you believe it, that usher calmly put his hand in his trouser pocket and fished out a small Yale key and gave it him without a word. What a gesture! The key of the Absolute. ”

“ There are people who can get into all kinds of difficulties over such an apparently harmless and simple an object as a key. Nearly every day some brilliant soul, after opening the door of his cabin and deposting one suitcase (and his key) inside, locks himself out when he starts back to get the rest of his belongings from his car. I have so thoroughly learned the expression that accompanies this predicament that when anyone wearing it comes into the office I hand him a master key before he speaks, and say "This key will open it." ”

“ And to recover the actual original key-word may, at times, provide some insight into the habits or mental make-up of the person who selected it, and who may select others like it, or might, conceivably, make use of this same key-word in some other kind of encipherment. If the key is short, it is practically always possible to recover more than one word; but with long keys, we seldom, if ever, recover more than the one word on which the numbers were actually based. ”

“ Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind. And you are not to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little of the tree in this particular bookcase. ”

“ One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can he produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.... ”

“ If he were the boy again knowing all he knew today, still the flaw would be there and sooner or later the same thing must have happened that had happened twenty years ago. He had been born for a wilder age, when men took what they wanted and held what they could without respect for law. ”

“ But,” I added bitterly, “the secret being in cipher I cannot obtain knowledge of it.”
“And have you no key?” smiled the hard-faced old seafarer in the thick reefer.
“None—unless,” and at that moment a strange thought flashed for the first time upon me, “unless the key is actually concealed within that rhyme!” I repeated the couplet aloud. Yes, all the cards of that piquet pack were mentioned in it—king, eight, knave, queen, seven, nine, ten!
My heart leapt within me. Could it be possible that by arranging the cards in the following order the record could be read? ”

“ Northwest Smith is one of the great adventurers of Science Fiction, one of that group of cool, gray-eyed men who roam the spaceways and provide much of the inspiration for the legends that are a part of the folklore of space. ”

“ As he said this he looked up through the glass of the conservatory to a high building I could see towering at the end of the garden. It was the building in which I had first seen that box, and I now understood how this connection had been made.
Mr. S——‘s movement had been involuntary.
Dropping his eyes, he finished by saying, with an almost imperceptible bow, “You may speak before this lady; she is the holder of a key.”
“The connection was broken because suspicion was aroused; to your other question you will find an answer in the box. Shall I open it for you?” ”

“ It is from this application of the word to these levers in musical instruments that the term is also used of the parts pressed by the finger in typewriters and in telegraphic instruments.
A key is the insignia of the office of chamberlain in a royal household (see Chamberlain and Lord Chamberlain) . The “power of the keys” (clavium potestas) in ecclesiastical usage represents the authority given by Christ to Peter by the words, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. xvi. 19) . ”

“ Key, kē, n. an instrument for shutting or opening a lock: that by which something is screwed or turned: the middle stone of an arch: a piece of wood let into another piece crosswise to prevent warping: (mus.) one of the small levers in musical instruments for producing notes: the fundamental note of a piece of music: that which explains a mystery: a book containing answers to exercises, &c.—ns. Key′board, the keys or levers in a piano or organ arranged along a flat board; Key′-bū′gle, a bugle with keys, having a compass of two octaves including semitones.—adjs. Key′-cold (Shak.) ”

“ We never pretended that it was anything but a common key. It is a common key to unlock a common lock. You remember that evidence, the lock was hanging onto the hasp, showing that they had not a key to unlock it. It does not matter whether it was a common lock or a common key or not. The key that unfastened that lock had blood upon it and it was found in the Carlson cottage, with paint upon it, or what seemed to be paint, of the same color as the paint that was upon the floor. ”

“ Again: the scales of the keys of G flat and of F sharp are the same—are played on precisely the same keys of the organ or piano—yet they are placed on different lines and spaces of the staff, and the signature of the first is six flats, and of the second six sharps.
Think of the disheartened state of the victim of this notation when he has learned to read comfortably in one key, and then, taking up a piece of music written in another key, finds that he has all the lines and spaces to relearn! The wonder is that he does not lose his wits altogether. ”

“ Though the Disposition of the Wards be ever so artful, novel, and judicious, a skilful Workman, having Access to the Entrance, will be at no Loss to fabricate a Key, which shall tally as perfectly with them as if the Lock had been open to his Inspection ”

“ Then, having five root numbers, ten or a dozen modifiers, the number of the page and the number of words on it, also the number of words in italics or connected by hyphens, you have studied addition and subtraction to little purpose if you can not so combine these various numbers that they shall furnish you, at last, with the number that you need to identify the particular word you have chosen. It is hard work. No wonder Mr. Donnelly covered, with figuring, a bundle of paper that a man can scarcely lift. The present writer consumed quires in a simple application of the cipher key to Hamlet. ”

“ It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. ”

“ Now what letter of the Alphabet does a group of five a’s stand for?—A, does it not? So the first letter in our secret is A. Now place the Classifier over the rest of the letters of the poem and [Pg 53] see to what form they belong, just as we have done for you in the first group. If you do your work carefully you will find the hidden secret.
If we can hide one word in “Biliteral Cipher” and a sentence in a short poem, do you not see how a whole story could be hidden so carefully within a book that it might not be discovered for many, many years? ”

“ LESSON XV
The phrase “Biliteral Cipher” is made to contain the hidden word “key” by the use of a capital letter for the a form, and a small letter for the b form. The borders to the lines contain the cipher word “letter,” the blue sticks being the a form, the red ones the b form. The reading proceeds from left to right in each line, beginning with the line at the top. The children may be directed to cut out any set of letters of appropriate size to form any desired phrase, using capital and small letters on the same principle as in the example. ”

“ Let us then imagine the word iiiiiiiiii presenting itself in a cryptograph to an individual without the proper key-phrase; or, if this be a supposition somewhat too perplexing, let us suppose it occurring to the person for whom the cipher is designed, and who has the key-phrase. What is he to do with such a word as iiiiiiiiii? In any of the ordinary books upon Algebra will be found a very concise formula (we have not the necessary type for its insertion here) for ascertaining the number of arrangements in which m letters may be placed, taken n at a time. ”

“ When we say of one that he speaks in a high key, we should be understood as meaning that his pitch is prevailingly high; and that the [46] reverse is true when we say of one that he speaks in a low key. While it is true that the key differs in individuals, yet experience shows that within a note or two we all use the same keys in expressing the same states of minds. The question for us is, What determines the key? ”

“ At the present hour we stand on the threshold of mysteries, with the rusted key in our hands which will open the closed door. Four thousand years ago man halted here, with the key in his hand, only it was new and glittering then, and used to that easily turned lock. ”

“ But he heard the jingle of many keys in her hand and the creak of the lock, as she tried each key ... and failed!
“Oh, this one will open it,” she whispered, each time. “Oh, this one must!”
Then, at last, she came to the last key in her hand. She thrust it into the hole: it fitted perfectly. She turned it—snap! The lock flew open. ”

“ Should none of us ever return you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I, or no one with authority from me, during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find, in addition to the papers addressed to you, other papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hands of a friend in this place, sealed, addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June, 1832. ”

“ I told the collector my story, and showed him Uncle Philip’s letter. Then I offered him the key, and asked for time to get half a mile away. That man said he would think it over and come back later.
This is all I have to say. I have made a will and left my rubies and pearls to the Society for the Prevention of Human Vivisection. If any man thinks this account a joke or an invention, let him coldly imagine the situation:
Given an iron box, known to contain wealth, said to contain dynamite, arranged to explode when the key is used to unlock it—what would any sane man do? What would he advise? ”

“ We shall have occasion to shew presently, that if the number of tumblers (and consequently the number of bits in the key) be small—not exceeding six, for instance—the possession of the true key gives any one the power of opening the lock, provided he has time and patience to go through a few hundred changes of the bits of the key; for, as some one arrangement must have been that by which the lock was locked, it must again occur if the user takes care to make all the arrangements in turn, and tries the lock after each. ”

“ This can produce a very long period indeed, especially when the collective shifts result in an odd number.
Substantially the same encipherment as the foregoing can be had with a slide and a key-word, as indicated in Fig. 155. The progression index, in this figure, is 1. The preliminary key-word, CULPEPER, enciphers the first eight letters, then moves forward in the alphabet and becomes D V M Q F Q F S for the encipherment of the next eight, E W N R G R G T for the encipherment of the third eight, and so on. In its practical application, one column could be taken at a time. ”

“ When the key is missed, if you say it doesn’t matter—if you point out that the door is locked, and tell the servants not to trouble themselves about finding the key—there will be no disturbance in the house ”

“ When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,—the same key I had once seen him holding. ”

“ The student who desires to prepare one may find the necessary suggestions in any shorthand manual; his substitutes can be two-digit numbers, and his encipherment may be any one of those intended for the normal alphabet. Having made mention of several processes which, to the younger student, may present frightening possibilities, we hasten to add that the four appended examples are all of a type which he should be able to solve without a great deal of difficulty.
100. By PICCOLA. (Key-Phrase Cipher - intercepted by a "Royalist" spy) . ”