IT  IS  TRUE  I  WAS  BORN  IN  IOWA,  BUT  I  CAN'T  SPEAK  FOR  MY  TWIN  SISTER.      —  ABIGAIL  VAN  BUREN

Abagail Van Buren (July 4, 1918 - ), columnist, born Pauline Esther Friedman, twin sister of Esther Pauline (Ann Landers), who died June 22nd of this year.

The second cryptogram was

BATTER  MY  HEART,  THREE  PERSON'ED  AND  GOD.      —  JOHN  DONNE

Robert Oppenheimer, reading this line from the John Donne poem, is said to have been inspired to name the first atomic bomb test (July 16, 1945) "Trinity".

Correct answers to both cryptograms came from  Delmar Burkitt,  Andrzej Derdzinski,  Bernie Doran,  John Jackson,  Alma Litten,  Leanna Maschmann,  Julia Minturn,  Carla Nuenke,  Kevin Skehan,  Jeff Wolfe,  and  Sally Yocom.  I accepted Andrzej's version, "Latter by heart, three sermon'd God", which uses a different set of four unique letters to arrive at a plausible answer.

The third puzzle dealt with the reshuffling of office posts.  The new posts are  Laura, Home Office;  John Cooper, Health;  Nora Draper, Education;  Ken Etcher, Defense;  Mr. Archer, Agriculture. 

Correct answers came from  Andrzej Derdzinski,  Bernie Doran,  Bob Kaplan,  Leanna Maschman,  Kevin Skehan,  and  Jeff Wolfe.  Bernie and Leanna are new puzzle solvers this month. 

I failed to give  Cindy Ann Beattie  credit last month for her June cryptogram solution.

We play a card game called "Oh Hell!".  In the first round eight cards are dealt to each player, in the next round, seven each, and so on, until in the eighth round each player gets just one card.

Then in each round players look at their cards and predict how many "tricks" he or she will take when the cards are played out with the top card of the suit led winning.  At the end of each round each player gets the number of points equal to the number of tricks won, plus a bonus of ten points if their prediction was correct.

Players keep their own score card, and shown is an example of a recent one of mine, giving me a total of 56.

In another game my total after five rounds was again 41, and again my final total was even, but I noticed that the eight "totals so far" were all different two-digit numbers such that the reverse of any one of the "totals so far" was another of the "totals so far".  What was the final score?

Round 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Prediction 5 3 5 4 0 1 2 0 Tricks won 5 2 0 4 0 2 2 1 Score 15 2 0 14 10 2 12 1 Total so far 15 17 17 31 41 43 55 56