earnest. The variety and quantity of non-political cryptography can only equal the number of motives that impel people to secrecy, and these motives, like their ciphers, are most heterogeneous. In the graveyard of New York's Trinity Church, on Broadway at the foot of Wall Street in the very heart of the financial district, stands a tombstone with an epitaph partly in cipher. Under it lies James Leeson, who died September 28, 1794, aged 38. The cipher inscription is in the ancient pigpen cipher, whose use goes back hundreds of years, and it reads Remember Death. Why Leeson had it carved there no one, perhaps, will ever know, but his motive may well have been that of the ancient Egyptians who first used cryptography in their sepulchral inscriptions: to stay passersby and bring the dead to life in their memory. More obscure are the motives that led several people to encipher entries in church registers, though the conjectures can be tantalizing. At
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