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these were not two sounds run together, but three sounds—a short fine sound, a long open sound, and another short sound; namely, ba-ah-at, or B, A and T. By reasoning out from twenty to thirty letters in this way they at last came to do away entirely with their long list of syllable sounds. After some such fashion, therefore, men began to realize the existence of consonants (definite, short, chopping sounds, made by some change in the mouth, along with a quick expulsion of the breath) and of breathings (quick expulsions of the breath alone) and of vowels (slower and open outbreathings accompanied by the voice). People did not at first distinguish so plainly as afterward between "breathings" and vowels, while in some cases they used more consonants than there was need of; the latter fell away in the course of time. But the great point was that they finally saw it was better, for instance, to use two signs for al than one. Although you might think it doubled the trouble, on the contrary, it lessened it. For, in the first place, it made writing much more exact, and fixed a spelling for everybody; in the second, it reduced the signs to a number which could be easily remembered. We have seen where the a came from. The / took its rise in a picture of a lioness, called lamed. Perhaps in some vanished syllabary the changed figure of a lioness stood for a syllable lam, and then was simplified into the Phoenician / from which we get it. To speak of one other: the letter / is thought to have come from the hieroglyph of two feathers side by side. These were degraded into a zigzag, and this at last in Italy was made perfectly straight. By such steps was accomplished the great change from syllabary to alphabet.

When you go to the Central Park and see the obelisk, or to a museum where they have Egyptian antiquities, like the Historical Society, do not fail to examine carefully the figures. Many of these, which are called hieroglyphs, are rebuses or soundwritings; some are symbols; others were pronounced, like our letters, very short. The Egyptians were more apt, however, to use alphabetic signs on paper than on stone. They thought what was old-fashioned was best, and kept on using for monuments the most ancient mode of writing. They had a way of writing a word very carefully according to its sounds, and then adding a keysymbol, or "determinative sign," or of clapping down an exact picture of the animal and thing after its written name. It would be like writing down the word horse, and then putting a small picture of a horse after it to make sure-reversing the process of a painter who made a picture of a dog and then wrote under it, "This is a dog," for fear some one might take it for an owl. It is singular that the Egyptians should keep up several different

methods of writing, at the same time, and that on the same stone we find picture-writing of things that mean the thing drawn, and of things that mean a sound, and should find, besides, alphabetic signs having very little to do with their origina! meanings and sounds. Wise as they were, the Egyptians were not wise enough to give up once for all their cumbersome methods, to choose out from their own abundant store an alphabet which would express all the full and half sounds in their language, and agree among themselves to use it for monuments as well as for letters and essays on paper. In fact, it seems necessary that such advances must be made by a foreign race which picks out what is useful, and leaves the useless characters behind. Yet, in no known writing can the use of symbols and "keys" be done away with entirely. For if we look sharply enough at our own writing we shall find that we use little pictures that are symbols, and abbreviations that are syllabic signs, and small marks that have the same office as the "keys,” or "determinative signs." These, you will learn, explained the general nature of the symbols near which they stood. But do not our exclamation and interrogation marks explain the nature of sentences? So you see we also use methods that remind us of all the past stages of writing. But the difference is that while we use only what is needed for clearness, the Egyptians appear to have held fast to signs that encumbered them and made reading harder. Now you remember from our last paper, how some of the wise men hold that our alphabet came from Egyptian hieroglyphs. But, if the Egyptians could not shake off the cumbersome features of their writing, what nation was it that improved and handed down to us our short and serviceable alphabet? I hope you have not forgotten the name. The Phoenicians!

So far as history tells us, the Phoenicians were a people of Asia Minor, supposed to have come from a land where the date-palm called phonix grows. We know absolutely that they once lived in Palestine. Thence they ventured off in ships to Greece, Italy, Sicily, Northern Africa, and Spain, building towns and founding colonies, and teaching the Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards whatever they would learn of letters, arts, and manufactures. The Athenians, who reckoned themselves, and are still thought by many to have been, the most intelligent men in the world, were taught by the Phonicians. The Etruscans and Latins of Italy were also their pupils and the pupils of their Greek colonies.

Being famous traders and merchants, large numbers of Phoenicians were always present as visitors or residents in the chief towns of Egypt, then the richest country in the world, and considered also

the oldest and the wisest. It was full of great temples, and there were so many priests and priestesses that a stranger might have thought there were no other classes. The priests were believed, and believed themselves, to possess all the wisdom of gods and men. There is evidence in Homer that at the time of the Trojan war the Egyptians were thought so wise that, favored by the gods, they were exempt from many of the ills of life, and were almost immortals. That is the way they impressed foreign nations. Now, it is supposed that while living in Egypt some wise men among the Phoenicians perfected that alphabet of twenty-two letters which is the ancestor of ours. In Egypt there had been two kinds of writing in use from time immemorial, — one seen cut in stone on obelisks and other monuments, called the hieroglyphic; the other for every-day use, and the writing of books, called the hieratic.* Hieroglyphic writing is the kind which appears on the obelisk which has stood at Heliopolis, in Egypt, for five thousand years, and on the two companion obelisks, one of which is in London and the other in New York. Our word paper, as you probably know, comes from the word papyrus, an Egyptian plant, on the fibers of which the hieratic was written in thick black ink with a coarse, soft pen made by sharpening a reed. Now, the Egyptians probably had a large number of true alphabetic letters; but the Phoenicians, being merchants and bankers, needed to write very quickly, and so to have a much less clumsy and complicated alphabet than the hieratic. They therefore chose from among the many letters of the hieratic twenty-two that would spell all the sounds in their own language, and naming them aleph for A, beth for B, gimel for C or G, and so onward, they formed the alpha-beta of the Greeks and our own alphabet.

But why did they give their letters such names as aleph, beth, gimel, and so forth? Why take Phoenician words and not Egyptian? For instance, why not take the Egyptian name for A, when they took the Egyptian letter? In Egyptian hieratic the sound A was indicated by a double loop made by sketching very quickly the outline of an eagle. But aleph, as the Phoenicians called this letter, means

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OX.

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it is, when we are young, to have names for the letters which recall their sound and yet suggest something familiar. Few of us can fail to remember how, when we learned our letters, we had blocks on which were very large capitals and then such legends as, "A was an Archer who Shot at a Frog; B was a Butcher who Had a fine Dog;" "C was a Cutler;" "D was a Dustman; " and so on. In the same way it was necessary for the Phoenicians to select Phoenician names for the Egyptian letters, beginning with the letter itself, in order to remind beginners of the sound of the letter. Perhaps another reason was that the Phonicians, before they borrowed the signs, had some sort of a letter-system of their own, probably a syllabary, in which the rough sketch of an ox's head was the sign for a syllable beginning with A. It was convenient to call the new letter by an old and well-known name. It was also possible to see in the letter that came originally from an eagle, but which had been greatly changed in Egypt during the lapse of centuries, the head of an And in the shapes of other letters in the "hieratic" or running hand of Egypt, they might fancy a resemblance to the things meant by the Phoenician names. Every time a Phoenician schoolboy looked at A, he may have thought of the loop as the muzzle, and the two points as the horns, and cried aleph, ox! In the old hieratic writing the sign chosen for B came from a little picture of a crane. But suppose the Phoenicians had long been accustomed to use the name beth, house, for a sign in their old syllabary. When the schoolboy saw the Egyptian B, he would cry beth, house! The third letter, C, G, or K (which were often used for each other), came down in hieratic from the hieroglyph of a throne, tent, or basket. The Phoenicians found it easier to call this gimel, or camel, since they could fancy a resemblance between it and the hump of the camel's back. And so it goes through the twenty-two letters. We see the Phoenicians dropping whatever was their former system, and using the better one of an alphabet. Since their day, it has never again made so great a gain under the various hands through which it has passed. The chief improvement has been to make separate and distinct the vowels which the Phoenicians did not find so important in their language as do we, and which the Egyptians could afford to neglect still more.

*Hieroglyphic,-from the Greek hiero, sacred, and gluphein, to hollow out or carve,- means literally to hollow out sacred characters: hence, a carving of symbols. Hieratic is from the Greek hieratikos, priestly,—and signifies in this connection writing made by and for the priests of ancient Egypt.

BEN'S SISTER.

BY MARIA L. POOL.

THE snow was more than a foot deep on a level, and Naomi could not estimate the depths of the drifts that were piled here and there.

"However," she said gayly, "the crust will bear you; and I only wish I were going, too. Tell Auntie her jelly was divine and her cake transcendent."

"Divine and tranthendent," lisped the child, who, although a boy of eight years, had been arrayed in his sister's heavy woolen jacket, which was the warmest garment available. He had on a cloth cap without a visor, and this cap was fastened down with many windings of a white "cloud." Rubber boots nearly enveloped his short legs, and leathern mittens were on his hands, in one of which was

grasped a six-quart tin pail. His bright, rosy face might have been that of a girl, and both in size and countenance he appeared younger than he really was.

Naomi used to say that when she felt very much in need of a sister, she called Ben a girl, but when she wanted a protector, she admitted that he was a boy.

"You'll go by the cart path, of course," spoke up a woman who was leaning back in a large chair, and whose pale, thin face bore a resemblance to the faces of the children before her, and showed that she was their mother and an invalid.

Naomi glanced at the thermometer, which hung by the door. It marked five degrees above zero.

Then she went into the room where her mother sat, and put more wood into the cracked cookstove. She was uneasy. She had an impulse to go out and run after her brother, but she remained quiet, and told herself how foolish she was.

She took up a book and read aloud for an hour, her mother placidly braiding straw the while. By that time a few flakes began to drift about in the air, whirling, apparently with no intention of falling.

Naomi started up and flung her book on the table. "Mother," she exclaimed; "I'm sorry we let Ben go!"

"Ben knows the way perfectly; and he will be home by dusk,” replied her mother.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Dunlap looked out of the window, marked the ominous light gray of the heavens, and knew well that a heavy snow-storm was beginning. It might be a week before the sun shone again.

Still it really was 66 thilly," as Ben had said, to worry about him.

The wind kept shrieking around the corner of the house. Naomi put on an old coat, hood, and mittens, and went out to bring in wood. She filled the woodbox and made a pile along the floor

"Yeth, ma'am," said Ben. "Now I'm off. by the stove. Remember, 'Omi, bithcuit for thupper."

"Don't break the eggs as you go, and don't spill the milk as you come!" called out Naomi at the door.

She stood an instant watching the boy's figure as it trudged along over the crust. She shivered as she looked, for the air was biting cold and swept down from the north.

The whole sky was covered by a light haze, such as often in New England precedes one of those snow-storms in which the flakes sift down with a sharp persistence that makes one breathless who tries to battle against them.

As she did so, a big Newfoundland dog came from a corner of the woodhouse and followed her back and forth. "Roy," she said, reprovingly, "you ought to have gone with Ben."

Roy wagged his tail seriously, as if to say, he had more weighty things to attend to than trotting after a boy.

When Naomi had finished her work, she walked toward the pine wood through which Ben had gone. She did not quite know how cold it was until she turned to come back, and faced the icy wind that made her coat feel as if it were but a rag.

How desolate and alone the small brown house,

A sudden anxiety came to the girl, and she which was her home, looked now to her! It stood called after her brother:

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in the midst of snow, with the snow flying about it.

The Dunlaps were very poor, as their home plainly showed. Naomi's mother was a widow, and had been unable to walk for two years. You can imagine that Naomi, at fifteen, felt as if she were heavily burdened.

She had been obliged to give up school just

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She went in directly and put a light where it shone mistily out toward the pine wood.

The cold was increasing so fast that she doubted if it could continue snowing much longer. But the wind would drive the snow from the ground and the drifts as blindingly as though the storm held on. As Naomi went back into the kitchen where her mother sat, her face was pale but determined.

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The thought of her little brother struggling alone, in such a storm, was no longer endurable. Mother," she said resolutely, "I am going out to the pine woods. I shall take a lantern, and Roy will go with me. Ben must be near home. I will meet him, and bring him in."

Mrs. Dunlap pressed her hands tightly together. In spite of her calm comments, she was half wild with anxiety.

She looked helplessly at her daughter, who was pulling on long rubber boots. There was no

neighbor within half a mile.

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The dog had kept near to her all the time. Now he lifted his broad, snow-sprinkled head, and pressed still nearer as if he said:

"I am going to take care of you."

"Go!" cried Naomi, fiercely. "Find him! Find him! Don't stay with me! Find Ben!" The dog galloped away from her as she gave the command. When he had gone, she felt an unreasoning and almost helpless terror.

She stood still, for she knew now that she had not the least idea which way to turn. She was like one in a dream, and still she must not dare to remain quiet. There was that demon of the cold waiting for her if she were to cease moving.

Her feet and hands ached so that from sheer pain she could hardly keep the tears back.

She went on, only trying to keep the wind behind

Then you will both be in the storm," said the her, for that was all she had to guide her in the mother feebly; "and I can do nothing." right direction, and she was fully aware how poor a guide that was.

Naomi came to her mother's side and kissed her.

"You have the worst of it," she said cheerfully, though her heart was like lead. "But I shall be back in half an hour. With my lantern and Roy, I shall be well armed."

She tied shawls over the very shabby coat, which was all she had. She wheeled her mother's chair so that the good woman might be able to keep the stove full of wood.

"Don't worry, Mother, but please have a hot stove when we come back," Naomi said, as she took up her lantern and, followed by Roy, hurried out into the storm.

The wind swept into the entry, and howled so that the anxious woman within shuddered.

It was comparatively easy for Naomi to go toward the pines, for the wind was at her back, and she ran on over the snow-crust, swinging her lantern before her, and calling her brother's name in her fresh young voice, that went forward on the rushing air. It was terribly cold, though, even with the wind behind her! Her hands and feet began to sting and ache.

She had not, as she believed, been going in the path toward the wood five minutes, when, in some unaccountable way, the wind was no longer behind her. It was rushing down upon her right, and she felt as if she were going downhill.

She stood perfectly still, but trembling with a thrill of terrible alarm. She lifted her lantern; but from the first, the light had been of little service. It made a small luminous halo, while beyond was a blank, impenetrable white wall that seemed to rush and roar about her- - a wall that moved.

Where was the courage with which she had started? She felt utterly subdued now, and her only thought was the thought of her brother.

She stamped her feet and swung her arms; then, as well as she could with her stiff lips, she whistled to the dog, but he did not answer.

She went staggering on, whither she knew not. As often as she could spare her breath, she shoutedBen!" and when no answer came, she felt as if she were calling that name in a great, cruel world that had nothing in it but storm.

Even the dog had left her. He had never been carefully trained. Perhaps he had gone home.

Mechanically she kept jumping about in the snow; for she dared not go far in any direction.

All at once, above the roar about her, she heard Roy's bark, short and quick. The sound was like an elixir of life in her veins. She sprang forward. The dog, she found, was but a few yards away. Naomi soon discovered him pulling at something in the snow. She dashed down beside that something, and began furiously to brush the snow from it.

"Ith 'at you, 'Omi?" asked a sleepy voice. The girl began to cry, but she did not stop working.

"Don't bother a fellow!" said Ben, drowsily, “I'm all right. I'm only rethting." "Resting!" repeated Naomi shrilly. "You are freezing! Get up! You shall get up!" She took hold of his collar and jerked him to his feet, the exertion sending a glow through her frame.

"Now, thop that! I tell you, I'm all right. I wath cold, but I got warm."

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