"Decipher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very arduous, formidable undertaking. The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries. When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory. Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—it can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of the page and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... until the poor girl had nearly gone mad; and it was only after long persuasion that I induced her to sign the paper, such a one as most travellers without passports in Austria are obliged to fill out. She finally wrote her name in a great scrawl which nobody could decipher, and gave as her country "Cape Town, Africa;" which again confounded the men, as they had no idea how a "Hottentot" could be an English subject. But they swallowed their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... manuscript; and, as we looked about, we picked up the remains of pencil, which had dropped from the dead man's fingers. Newman opened the manuscript, and though it was rotten, and the characters much defaced, he could still decipher them. He glanced his ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... passed; in that perpetual blackness there was no such thing as day. We saw no one save Desiree and the serving men. Once a messenger appeared carrying a bundle of quipos; I was able to decipher their meaning sufficiently to understand that we were invited to some religious ceremony in the great cavern. But I thought it injudicious to allow a meeting between Harry and the king, ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... to decipher Napoleon's wishes; he seems to have believed that war was inevitable; there is no proof that he desired it. He made preparations; the army was reorganised, the numbers increased, and a new weapon introduced. At the same time he looked about ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
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