Others with wits superior to my own may draw additional and more suggestive ones: First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made in some other way than by breaks.
Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No.

1 meant nothing--that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.
Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of the first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing for the same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or phrase as a complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and always to her dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all but the simple one with which she had started.
Fourth: No.

1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in itself.
Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading fell.
Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape or nature.
Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.
Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show the first one to be a word of one letter.

There are but two words in the English language of one letter--a and i--and in the specimens before me but one character, that of [], which shows shading, next to another shaded character.
Ninth: [] was therefore a or i A decided start.
All this, of course, was simply preliminary.
The real task still lay before me.

It was to solve the meaning of those first seven characters, which, if my theory were correct, was a communication in itself, and one of such importance that, once mastered, it would give the key to the whole situation.
[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; or with the shading (same in bold - transcriber) []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; You have all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet.
Let us see if it applies to this one.
There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.