Here's a nice piece of historical cryptography I hope you'll appreciate: a piece of "pigpen ciphertext" engraved on a 1792 New York gravestone, on Flickr. There's another (not quite so good) image of the same thing most of the way down on this page on forgotten New York sights. But before you click anywhere, try and decode it for yourself from the transcription I've put above!
Hint: the single-dot box appears four times, and is (just as you'd expect) a vowel. :-)
If you want to know more, the article mentioned on the page was from the Meyer Berger column on page 24 of the New York Times, January 2nd 1957, and is in the paper's online archive: they charge non-subscribers $3.95 for a PDF, if you happen to be reaaaaaaally interested. But maybe this is a sensible place to stop...
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