A problem which arose during research involved in designing a machine to translate hand-keyed Morse code into printed text may be stated as follows: Let

be a sequence of independent random variables all of which have the same distribution. Assume that the probability that

,

, is zero. Let

be a positive integer

, and consider all subsequences

of

consisting of

consecutive variables. Let us distinguish, with a check (

), the largest member of each such subsequence. We have studied, and partially tabulated,

, the probability that exactly

members of the sequence

are not checked. This paper contains most of the pertinent results.