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More "Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each circle of the alphabet absolutely blocks the preceding one, but, when the entire deal is complete, the removal of cards from the alphabet releases those on the circles beneath, ...
— Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience - New Revised Edition, including American Games • Adelaide Cadogan
... wholly unexpected, and, so far as he was concerned, unprecedented occurrence. At the earnest solicitation, however, of several who happened to be present, he consented to go on with the experiment, and with the assistance of the alphabet commonly employed in similar emergencies, the following communication was obtained and written down immediately by myself. Whether any, and if so, how much weight should be attached to it, I venture no decision. That ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... that is, the Lord Christ. He claims eternity and omnipotence. He describes himself here in the very words which in the 4th verse are descriptive of the eternal subsistence of the person of the Father. "Alpha and Omega," the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, are explained in the words,—"the beginning and the ending." This language is not to be understood as expressing or defining the duration of the Godhead only; but it points also to the divine purpose ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... motions to the right or left of a needle or indicator. Those of France are of the class called dial telegraphs, in which an index, or needle, is carried around the face of a dial, around the circumference of which are placed the letters of the alphabet; any particular letter being designated by the brief stopping of the needle. A similar system has been used in Prussia; but, recently, the American, or recording instrument of Professor Morse, has been introduced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... almost boundless. The melody itself is plaintive; a plaintive grace informs the entire piece. The harmonization is far more wonderful, but to us the chord of the tenth and more remote intervals, seem no longer daring; modern composition has devilled the musical alphabet into the very caverns of the grotesque, yet there are harmonies in the last page of this study that still excite wonder. The fifteenth bar from the end is one that Richard Wagner might have made. From that bar to the close, every group ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... then! Amedee recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that the eldest of the Gerards had given him—that good Louise, so wise and serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind. The child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving, large, indented leaves of the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that grave, the most brilliant by far was the third son, Joseph Addison Alexander. Dr. Charles Hodge said of him: "Taking him all in all, he was the most gifted man with whom I have ever been personally acquainted," In childhood, such was his precocity that he knew the Hebrew alphabet at six years of age (I am afraid that some ministers do not know it at sixty); and he could read Latin fluently when he was only eight! Of his wonderful feats of memory I could give many illustrations; one was that on the day that I was matriculated in the Seminary with fifty other students, ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... to start, as on a chace, Mid twinkling insult on Heaven's darken'd face, Like a conven'd conspiracy of spies Wink at each other with confiding eyes! Turn from the portent—all is blank on high, 5 No constellations alphabet the sky: The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew, And as a child beneath its master's blow Shrills out at once its task and its affright—[486:4] The groaning world now learns to read aright, 10 And with its Voice ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pronunciation, the Protestants gave countenance to the new. Gardiner employed the authority of the king and council to suppress innovations in this particular, and to preserve the corrupt sound of the Greek alphabet. So little liberty was then allowed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... was quick in its attainments; he was easily taught the common lessons of youth, and some of his peculiar endowments began early to appear. At the age of four, while recovering from some illness, he selected as his recreation the study of the Greek alphabet, and was able to name all the letters, and write them in a rude way upon a slate. A year after, he made rapid progress in the English class, and at an early period became somewhat eminent among his schoolfellows for his melodious voice ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... alphabet contains 28 characters. These are the characters of English, but with "q", "w", "x", and "y" removed, and six diacritical letters added. The diacritical letters are "c", "g", "h", "j" and "s" with circumflexes (or "hats", as Esperantists fondly call ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... book said that he went on a picnic with his family, and while idly carving his name on the trunk of a beech tree he conceived the idea that he might in the same way make individual letters of the alphabet on wooden blocks, ink them ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... you how Miss Anne heard Stephen read his chapter, and taught Tim and Martha, and even little Nan herself, the first few letters of the alphabet; after which she made them all repeat a verse of a hymn, and, when they could say it correctly, sang it with them over and over again, in her sweet and clear voice, until Stephen felt almost choked with a sob of pure gladness, that would every ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... it must be so designated—that we gather the real genius, or mental character of the ordinary classes of society. I do assure you that some of these chap publications are singularly droll and curious. Even the very rudiments of learning, or the mere alphabet-book, meets the eye in a very imposing manner—as in ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the occasional use of a parlour, ever appear to come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes' walk of the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the number of times they are asked to do it and don't. It really seems,' said Tom, relinquishing the paper with a thoughtful sigh, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... of the bar in good standing," he reminded me stiffly. "If you knew the first letter of the legal alphabet you'd know that I couldn't advise a ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... writing upon Confucianism and Taoism, says that the written language of China takes us back at least five thousand years. Like most things in China, the language has suffered very little change since its adoption and completion. It does not consist of words, built up of letters, as with us; it has no alphabet, no letters, but its curious symbols represent objects, qualities, ideas, or sounds, which by combination express every shade of Chinese thought. The number of these written characters is variously estimated by European philologists at from 25,000 to 50,000, although it is believed that ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... them, that flourished in the same early ages of the world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great master in this kind of writing. He composed an "Odyssey" or epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four- and-twenty books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first book, which was called ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... splendid weather afforded Servadac every facility for observing the heavens. Night after night, constellations in their beauty lay stretched before his eyes—an alphabet which, to his mortification, not to say his rage, he was unable to decipher. In the apparent dimensions of the fixed stars, in their distance, in their relative position with regard to each other, he could ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... silken carpets, bearing the fleur-de-lis. We sat on sofas of embroidery as fine as an engraving and as rich in color as a painting by Morland. The bright autumn sunshine illuminated the ormulu brass of the First Empire, gilt eagles, crowns, cupids, and the only letter of the alphabet ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... that I could tell you something about their language. It sounds very soft and musical, but is very difficult to speak, and the characters make all one's previous knowledge of an alphabet utterly useless. We left Cronstadt on the afternoon of Wednesday, where neither was our baggage nor were we examined; indeed, half-a-dozen people might have smuggled themselves on board, and got away without difficulty. We had fine ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... smart. I can write, though, better'n some of the boys up at school. I saw lots of names on the shed door. See here now," and scrambling down, Ben pulled out a cherished bit of chalk and flourished off ten letters of the alphabet, one on each of the dark stone ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... to Transcribe the Chinese Character, or to put their Alphabet into our Letters, because the Words would be both Unintelligible, and very hard to Pronounce; and therefore, to avoid hard Words, and Hyroglyphicks, I'll translate them as ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... Lecture. New Materials for the Science of Language and New Theories; Language and Reason; The Physiological Alphabet; Phonetic Change; Grimm's Law; On the Principles of Etymology; On the Powers of Roots; Metaphor; The Mythology of the Greeks; Jupiter, The Supreme Aryan God; Myths ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... fourteen branch or Sub-Post-offices, designated as "Stations," located in convenient parts of the city, north of the general office. They are named from the letters of the alphabet, and are known as "Stations A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, K, L, M, N, and O." They are designed to serve as distributing centres for certain sections of the city. They receive from the general office all letters and papers for delivery in their sections, and to ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... desk made an electronic noise at me and the words I had been arranging in my mind for the morning letters splattered into alphabet soup like a printer dropping ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of the first ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... was popularly called "double A, B, C," to indicate that he had twice as many benefices as there were letters in the alphabet. He had, however, no objection to more, and was faithful to the dispensing power. The same course was pursued by Secretary Bave, Esquire Bordey, and other expectants and dependents. Viglius, always remarkable for his pusillanimity, was at this period already anxious to retire. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... five species of grain that took place under a particular king in a particular year, the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in a general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like a common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, whose mutual relations are comparatively ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Catechism, which, in those days, had always an alphabet as janitor to the gates of its mysteries—who, with the catechism as a consequence even dimly foreboded, would even have learned it?—and showed Gibbie the letters, naming each several times, and going over them repeatedly. Then she gave ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the native languages with so little difficulty that "it seems a gift from heaven." Chirino gives some account of these, illustrated with specimens of three—Tagalan, Harayan, and Visayan—with the alphabet used by the Filipinos. He also praises the politeness, in word and act, of the Tagalos, and gives them credit for much musical ability. A chapter is assigned to the native alphabet and mode of writing. All, women as well ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... of learning by rote, is daily falling more into discredit. All modern authorities condemn the old mechanical way of teaching the alphabet. The multiplication table is now frequently taught experimentally. In the acquirement of languages, the grammar-school plan is being superseded by plans based on the spontaneous process followed by the child in gaining its mother tongue. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all the inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... instructive picture lesson-book for very little folk. Beginning with an illustrated alphabet of large letters, the little reader goes forward by easy stages to word-making, reading, counting, writing, and finally to the most popular nursery rhymes ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... make it. I have even heard him tell mother that he "stretched it a leetle mite," when he was forced to by people who couldn't seem to be made to understand what was required to upbuild a nation. He said our language was founded on the alphabet, and to master it you had to begin with "a". And he said the nation was like that; it was based on townships, and when a township was clean, had good roads, bridges, schoolhouses, and churches, a county was in fine shape, and when each county was in order, the state was right, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... hardly explain. It must have been the intuitive grasping of a mind prematurely active and retentive. She could read music as easily as a Boston girl of her age could read the daily papers, and it did not seem to her in any sense difficult to understand the much more simple alphabet of spoken language. She had only one objection to her tutor. He helped her over the hard words and all that and was not cross but as she confided to her aunt, "he was very disagreeable—she didn't like him for he chewed—and ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... Has it brought him into our temple, in the spirit? No. Have we had any ignorant brothers and sisters that didn't know round O from crooked S, come in among us meanwhile? Many. Then the angels are NOT learned; then they don't so much as know their alphabet. And now, my friends and fellow-sinners, having brought it to that, perhaps some brother present - perhaps you, Brother Gimblet - will pray a ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... sealed without an envelope, after the fashion of our great-grandfathers. On it was pasted a strip of the tape used in electric-recording instruments, and the characters were those of the Morse alphabet, rather an unusual sight nowadays, when receiving messages by sound is the universal practice. Underneath the row of dots and dashes had been written their English equivalents in Indiman's small, close handwriting. The transcribed ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... notes we sing the better to distinguish them; hence the custom of sol-faing with certain syllables. To tell the keys one from another they must have names and fixed intervals; hence the names of the intervals, and also the letters of the alphabet attached to the keys of the clavier and the notes of the scale. C and A indicate fixed sounds, invariable and always rendered by the same keys; Ut and La are different. Ut is always the dominant of a major scale, or the leading-note of a minor ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... best results by the great French Orientalist, De Sacy, and by the Swede, Akerblad. But though the former by a mechanical method recognized correctly the meaning of several groups, and though Akerblad had even ascertained most of the signs of the demotic alphabet, still they were both incapable of discerning the elements of which the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... sleepiest letter of the alphabet?" repeated Russ. "Do you mean the letter I? That ought to be sleepy 'cause it's ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... to say that I have no specific to give as a preventive for sea-sickness. Even the Phoenicians who had time, during the intervals of their hardy voyaging, to invent the alphabet, were unable to devise a remedy for the mal de mer. Custom does not create immunity, for even the mighty Nelson, who had a life-long acquaintance with the ocean, was afflicted with sea-sickness to the end ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... another when their thoughts are expressed in writing. The cause of this may be thus explained. We in Europe form an idea in the mind, and this we express by certain sounds, which differ in different countries; these sounds are committed to writing by means of the letters of the alphabet, which are only symbols of sounds, and, consequently, a writing in Europe is unintelligible to every one who is ignorant of the spoken language in which it happens to be written. The Chinese and the other natives in these seas have, on the contrary, ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... not a new one to the dealer in the alphabet. He was an old depredator; and had before encountered angry authors, and artful lawyers. He was cool, collected, and unabashed. Not indeed entirely: but sufficiently ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... one of these classes is called a font, the average weight of which is about 800 pounds. Whereas our alphabet has 26 letters, the compositor must really use of letters, spaces, accent marks, and other characters in an English font 152 distinct types, and in each font there are 195,000 individual pieces. The largest number of letters ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... will wrestle with you," said I. "If you should chance to put me down, I will do penance by teaching you the Armenian alphabet—the very word alphabet, as you will perceive, shows us that our letters came from Greece. If, on the other hand, I should chance to put you down, you will ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is based upon a distinction between "positive" and "negative" thought, which is made with an air of wonderful precision and accuracy in "the Alphabet of Human Thought."[333] "Thinking is positive when existence is predicated of an object." "Thinking is negative when existence is not attributed to an object." "Negative thinking," therefore, is not the thinking ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... lasagnes, which are the short, flat pieces one and two inches wide, cut and frequently moulded by hand, to the fideline, which are the long, thin threads, the finest of which are many times smaller than vermicelli. Between these two extremes there is a great variety, which includes the alphabet and many fancy designs. ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... it is a dreadful task indeed to learn, and, if possible, a more dreadful task to teach to read. With the help of counters, and coaxing, and gingerbread, or by dint of reiterated pain and terror, the names of the four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, are, perhaps, in the course of some weeks, firmly fixed in the pupil's memory. So much the worse; all these names will disturb him, if he have common sense, and at every step must stop his progress. To begin ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... shouted, jumping up from his chair. "What do you think the letter h was put in the alphabet for? For you to leave ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... six, and keeps them till they are eighteen, a period of twelve years will be passed within its walls; more than a third part of the average of human life. These children, then, are to be taken almost before they learn their alphabet, and be discharged about the time that men enter on the active business of life. At six, many do not know their alphabet. John Wesley did not know a letter till after he was six years old, and his mother then took him on her lap, and taught ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... how scrupulously a little carter-boy will deliver half-a-dozen messages, each of a different purport from the rest, to as many persons, all the messages committed to him at one and the same time, and he not knowing one letter of the alphabet from another. When I want to remember something, and am out in the field, and cannot write it down, I say to one of the men, or boys, come to me at such a time, and tell me so and so. He is sure to do it; and I therefore look upon ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... half a dozen persons in that room could have perceived any difference in the two readings of a thesis written in a language of which even the alphabet was unknown known to them, yet every individual among them could keenly appreciate the magnanimity of Ishmael, who would have sacrificed his scholastic fame for his friend's benefit, and the quickness and integrity of Walter in discovering the generous ruse and refusing the sacrifice. They ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... there any book available save the portuary, crookedly and contractedly written on vellum, so as to be illegible to anyone unfamiliar with writing, with Latin, or the service. However, the anchoret yielded to his importunity so far as to let him learn the alphabet, traced on the door in charcoal, and identify the more sacred words in the book—which, indeed, were all ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in this respect, and learn that the knowledge of books is only the beginning of wisdom, and that the true knowledge must include also that of the living book,—the student entrusted to our care,—we have scarcely learned the alphabet of true education. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... On the Simplification of Oriental Languages, 1795. The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... it vexes, That thus on our labors stern CHRONOS should frown Should change our soft liquids to izzards and Xes, And turn true-love's alphabet all upside down! ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... came off, the stag beetles were so erratic that no prize was awarded, and they immediately ceased to be the rage. The rage for stag beetles was succeeded by a rage for secret alphabets. One boy invented a secret alphabet made of simple hieroglyphics, which was imparted only to a select few, who spent their spare time in corresponding with each other by these cryptic signs. The boy who gave good advice was not of those ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... stored with knowledge and full of original power. Through reading, lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, it was observable in the picture, and observed in the text, that his face had an oriental cast. The same, we may recall, was said of that of the Seeress of Prevorst, and the circumstance presents ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... justification of his policy in executing the criminals, said that he "discovered some curious characters which he was unable to read," &c.; showing thereby, that that high functionary, did not understand even the Greek Alphabet, which was only necessary, to have been able to read proper names written ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... And the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-Fayes,—doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian, he's a fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,—so, as I was saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says he, 'when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God the Father, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... know His A, B, C, As bees where flowers are set: Would'st thou a skilful teacher be?— Learn, then, this alphabet. ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... duty in hundreds of places before. Some of them had even appeared in the almanac! But in Banbury they were all new, and so funny that everybody laughed till their sides ached. And the wonderful horses! Madame Orley's educated steed, which picked out letters from a card alphabet and spelled words with them, went through the military drill with the precision of a trooper, and waltzed about the arena with his mistress on his back!—well, he was not a horse; he was a wizard steed, like the one described in the "Arabian Nights Tales." Alice almost thought ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... unwholesome. So I shall prescribe Rudolph's company for myself, to ward off an attack of moral indigestion. I am very glad he has come back—really glad," she added, conscientiously. "Poor old Rudolph! what between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the alphabet—What are those things, mon ami, that are always going up and down in ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... statued galleries, l. 176. The art of painting has appeared in the early state of all societies before the invention of the alphabet. Thus when the Spanish adventurers, under Cortez, invaded America, intelligence of their debarkation and movements was daily transmitted to Montezuma, by drawings, which corresponded with the Egyptian ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... language. The question as to the origin of the earliest written characters employed in Japan is one that has produced, and probably will continue to produce, much controversy. These are known as Shinji letters of the God Age, but they have left no traces in the existing alphabet. There is a remarkable difference between the written and spoken dialects of Japan. The grammars of the two are entirely different, and it is possible to speak the language colloquially and yet not be able to read a newspaper, book, or letter; while, on the other hand, it is possible ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... name, Sanch," and Ben put all the gay letters down upon the flags with a chirrup which set the dog's tail to wagging as he waited till the alphabet was spread before him. Then with great deliberation he pushed the letters about till he had picked out six; these he arranged with nose and paw till the word "Sancho" lay before him ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... dinner when hungry. "Common-sense business-habits"—his favorite phrase—he believed to be quite sufficient for the elucidation of the most difficult question in law, physic, or divinity. The science of law, especially, he held to be an alphabet which any man—of common sense and business habits—could as easily master as he could count five on his fingers; and there was no end to his ridicule of the men with horse-hair head-dresses, and their quirks, quiddits, cases, tenures, and such-like devil's lingo. Lawyers, according to ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... agreeably. Someone has said, very wisely, "A talker who monopolizes the conversation is by common consent insufferable, and a man who regulates his choice of topics by reference to what interests not his hearers but himself has yet to learn the alphabet of the art." To be agreeable in conversation, one must first learn the law of talking just enough, of listening politely while others speak, and of speaking of that in which one's ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... air, and did not put me to school until I had turned my sixth year. One day, playing in the shoemaker's shop, William Farrel asked me if I knew my letters. I answered 'No.' He then took down a primer from a shelf, and began to teach me the alphabet, at the same time amusing me by likening the letters to familiar objects in his shop. I soon learned to read, and in about six weeks I surprised my father by reading from an easy book which the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... holds that, owing to the monosyllabic character of the Chinese language and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for postal correspondence. It ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... which meet you everywhere are very touching. Go from bed to bed, and you see in their hands primers, spelling-books, and Bibles, and the poor, worn, sick creatures, the moment they feel one throb of returning health, striving to master their alphabet or spell out their Bible. In the evening, or rather in the fading twilight, some two hundred of them crept from the wards, and seated themselves in a circle around a black exhorter. Religion to them was a real thing; and so their worship had the beauty of sincerity, while I ought to add that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Cadmus introduced into Greece the letters of the alphabet which were invented by the Phoenicians. This is alluded to by Byron, where, addressing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... may state that, within these few years, after the lapse of nearly fifty, I had a call from a respectable old man, who, having heard I was in Edinburgh, had found me out, and announced himself to be Mr. ——, who had taught me the alphabet, and first guided my hand to wield the pen which now records this incident. I have rarely met with an occurrence more gratifying to my feelings, than when the old gentleman (for he was a gentleman in the best sense of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... I had expected, for though I thought her looks very terrible at first—and she was certainly firm—she was really kind and gentle. Under her instruction I gained the first knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, of which I was before profoundly ignorant. Of course she was very gentle with Ellen, as everybody was, and Fanny seemed to be very fond of her. She was courageous, too, as I before long had evidence. I remember one night being suddenly lifted in her arms, and carried out by her into the ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... delicious," he answered her, speaking more lightly than he felt. "What a numskull you make, Grizel, of any man who presumes to write about women! I am at school again, and you are Miss Ailie teaching me the alphabet. But I thought you lost that serious little girl on the doleful day when she heard you say that you ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... echoed the lawyer. "Why, my miserable dreams have never been free from the horror of that man's face. You don't know what it is—murder! Nobody knows who hasn't been concerned in it. You read of murders in your newspapers. A shot B, or C poisoned D, and so on, all through the letters of the alphabet, with a fresh batch for every Sunday; but it never comes home to you. You think of the horror of it in a shadowy kind of way, as you might think of having a snake twisted round your waist and legs, like that ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... adulteration of valuable compounds; the photographer recorded the exact action of the trotting horse; the telephone might convey orders from one end of an estate to the other; and thus you might go through the whole alphabet, the whole cyclopaedia of science, and apply every single ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... smart," said she; "he knows his alphabet already, and we are going to put him to school. If he takes after his father he will be ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... childhood, what a void it makes in the growing heart; and how quietly its place is filled by unworthier influences. Does all the abstract wealth, which there might be in the growth and development of those who learn the alphabet of life upon our knee, take one pang from the natural and pardonable sorrow with which we watch the heavy footprint of an inevitable experience, crushing out the last frail remnant of childhood ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... I do not understand the deaf and dumb alphabet. I'm sorry, but you'll have to go to some one else. I'm very unfortunate. I have to mend this dress and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... young; the one is true of the weak, and the other of the robust. One thing is certain, that he who loves wisely in youth will in age not go astray. But derision is for those of mature age, into whose hands Love puts the alphabet. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... any bid you stop or stay, or turn your feet from out your way, say but the word that is spelled with the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet three times in a loud voice, and all will go well with ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... unevangelized community, the people move on a lower level. Not only social condition, but morality and education, feel the want of the elevating influence of the gospel. A seminary that commences operations by teaching the alphabet must advance far, and climb high, before its graduates will stand on a level with those whose pupils were familiar with elementary algebra when they entered; yet its course of study may be the best to secure the usefulness ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... raising his eyebrows as she entered the room, 'here's our little monitor—(or is it monitress, eh, Priscilla?)—back again. Children, we shall all have to mind our p's and q's—and, indeed, our entire alphabet, now!' ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... flew over the road and the hills, and Pellicanus cried: "Look there! They always fly in two straight lines, and form a letter of the alphabet. This time it is an A. Can you see it? When the Lord was writing the laws on the tablets, a flock of wild geese flew across Mt. Sinai, and in doing so, one effaced a letter with its wing. Since that time, they always fly in the shape of a letter, and their whole race, that is, all ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... feared she would not avail herself of it. Indeed, I feared that she was daily becoming more alienated from him, as she pursued onward and upward the bright mental track on which she had entered. And it was seeing that she had not yet begun to con the alphabet of true knowledge, that disturbed me most. If I could have seen her thoughtful for others, humble in her endeavor after duty, I should have hailed, rejoicingly, her intellectual illumination. As it was, I could not help saying to her, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... out of their context, more significant than actions without a background. They are mental phenomena to be observed and described by the psychologist; to the moralist they are, taken alone, as unmeaning as the letters of the alphabet, but, like them, capable in combination of carrying many meanings. Anger, fear, wonder, and all the rest are, as natural emotions, neither good nor bad; they are colors, which may enter into a picture and in it acquire ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... striking analogy between the letters of our alphabet and their relation to the language of the vast volume of printed books, and the eighty or more primary elements and their relation to the vast universe of material things. The analogy may not be in all respects a strictly true one, but it is an illuminating one. Our twenty-six letters combined and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... flirted and dined and sang the night away. Robert Tomes echoed the strain in his tale of college life a little later, under stricter social and ecclesiastical conditions. There was a more serious vein also. In 1827 the Kappa Alpha Society was the first of the younger brood of the Greek alphabet—descendants of the Phi Beta Kappa of 1781—and in 1832 Father Eells, as he is affectionately called, founded Alpha Delta Phi, a brotherhood based upon other aims and sympathies than those of Mr. Philip Slingsby, but one which appealed instantly to clever men in college, and has not ceased ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... Purple Dragoon to worry through to-day any the quicker. Poor, brave, noble, drawling, manly, pipe-smoking fellows! On this particular occasion FOOTLES uttered only one word. It was short, and began with the fourth letter of the alphabet. But he may be pardoned, for some of the glowing embers from his magnificent briar-wood pipe had dropped on to his regulation overalls. The result was painful—to FOOTLES. All the others laughed as well as they could, with clays, meerschaums, briars, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... and delf to sell! He clashes the basins like a bell; Tea-trays, baskets ranged in order, Plates with the alphabet ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... knew everybody intimately—by sight. She was squat, dyed, rouged and penciled, badly, too. She was written down in the city directory as Madame de Chevreuse, but she was emphatically not of French extraction. In her alphabet there were generally but twenty-five letters; there were frequent times when she had no idea that there existed such a letter as "g." How she came to appropriate so distinguished a name as De Chevreuse ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... perfect a poem as Homer's "Iliad" was not the product of the genius of a great poet, but that the letters of the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Gerbeaux, who was allowed to go out foraging, under escort of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted sizes. The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the beans, the onions and the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... foreign origin—Greek or Ph[oe]nician. This nothing but the most inconsiderate and uncritical patriotism can deny. Denied, however, it has been; and the indigenous and independent evolution of an alphabet has been claimed; the particular tribe to which it has more especially been ascribed being the Turdetani. These—and the passage I am about to quote is the passage of Strabo just alluded to—are "put forward as the wisest of the Iberi, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... 26. p. 415.)—I do not think that "M. or N." are used as the initials of any particular words; they are the middle letters of the alphabet, and, at the time the Prayer Book was compiled, it seems to have been the fashion to employ them in the way in which we now use the first two. There are only two offices, the Catechism and the Solemnisation of Matrimony, in which more than one letter is used. In ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... stick to the familiar devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish this great feat under very similar climatic ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... father, ministering to his habits and tastes, a good deal, I believe, for our sakes, and to keep near us. She was a coarse woman; and, unlike her race in general, exhibited but few outward demonstrations of attachment. When her work was done in the evening she sometimes taught us the alphabet and to spell words of three letters; the rest we mastered for ourselves, and taught each other, and so in process of time we were able to read. The like with writing: Nelly pointed out the rudiments, and Gabrielle, endowed with magical powers of swift perception, speedily ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... to the second symbol in the Phoenician alphabet, and appears in the same position in all the European alphabets, except those derived, like the Russian, from medieval Greek, in which the pronunciation of this symbol had changed from b to v. A new form had therefore to be invented for the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great, had been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the worship of Thor and Woden. He had translated the Bible for them, and had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose. He had omitted, however (prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their histories of the Jewish wars. The Goths, he held, were only too fond of fighting already, and 'needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.' He had now a large number of converts, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... tripled now. Read my letter once and again. Preserve it as a sacred deposit. Lay it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little skiff of your political system safe into the port ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... the manufacturing, engrossed activity of the town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar School, she fancied the air was finer, beyond the factory smoke. She wanted to learn Latin and Greek and French and mathematics. She trembled like a postulant when she wrote the Greek alphabet for ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... consecrated his own Church of St. Peter, Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add any further ceremonial, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Brick, Cheddar and Swiss. To attempt to classify and describe all of these would be impossible, so we will content ourselves by picking a few of the cold and hot, the plain and the fancy, the familiar and the exotic. Let's use the alphabet ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... inflorescence, at certain periods, as do plants and trees; and some races flower later than others. This architecture was the first flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent not by imaged words and vitalized alphabet; they vitalized stone, and their poets were ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... but you may Guess who I mean. When are you coming home, Betty? I want so to see your dear face. My Respects to Gulian and Clarissa, and Obedience to Grandma—I do not Recollect her whole Name. My Sampler is more perfectly Evil than ever, but I have completed the Alphabet and I danced on it, which Miss Bidwell said was Outrageous naughty, but my temper Felt calmed afterward. It has taken four Days to write this, farewell, from your lonesome ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... of her own subconscious self," said the Tracer quietly. "Science has been forced to admit such things, and, as you know, we are on the verge of understanding the alphabet of some of the unknown forces which we must some day ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... sarcophagi with their winged genii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments of Roman mosaic and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity as if they had been the scattered letters of a new alphabet; and he saw with astonishment his friend Vittorio's indifference to these wonders. Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack of interest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Divine activity as regards us men is not merely to make us happy, but to make us happy in order that we may be good. He whom what he calls his religion has only saved from the wrath of God and the fear of hell has not learned the alphabet of religion. Unless God's promises evoke men's goodness it will be of little avail that they seem to quicken their hope. Joyful confidence in our sonship is only warranted in the measure in which we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... if he will sacrifice to Cybele or Isis, he will be pardoned—if not, the tiger has him. At least, so I suppose; but the trial will decide. We talk while the urn's still empty. And the Greek may yet escape the deadly Theta of his own alphabet. But enough of this gloomy subject. How is ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... be easily pronounced correctly by using the Spanish alphabet. There are no silent letters, and ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet." ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... The Banquet of the Ten Virgins, the hymn is found from which the following is a cento. It contains twenty-four strophes, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet in alphabetical order, and ending with the ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... divided into small half-inch squares which we consider as the unit. Thus there is in any cross-section 1 unit between the two central lines and 4 units on either side. Lengthwise there are 26 units. The 26 squares which lie between the two heavy central lines are marked with the printed letters of the alphabet from A to Z. These two heavy central lines are to represent an electric railway track on a street. On either side the 4 rows of squares are filled in an irregular way with black and red figures of the three first digits. ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... roofs. Farther along were the railway tracks that Yates objected to; and a line of masts and propeller funnels marked the windings of Buffalo Creek, along whose banks arose numerous huge elevators, each marked by some tremendous letter of the alphabet, done in white paint against the somber brown of the big building. Still farther to the west was a more grateful and comforting sight for a hot day. The blue lake, dotted with white sails and an occasional trail of smoke, lay shimmering ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... over a ferry-boat into the icy East River. There is an averted strangulation of a baby and for the second time in a Saltus opus a dying millionaire leaves his fortune to the St. Nicholas Hospital. Was Saltus ballyhooing for this institution? The hero is a modern Don Juan. Alphabet Jones appears occasionally, as he does in many of the other novels. This Balzacian trick obsessed the author for a time. The book is dedicated to John S. Rutherford and bears as a motto on its title page this quotation ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... used in their Empire, the Uighur, the Persian and Arabic, that of the Lamas (Tibetan), that of the Niuche, introduced by the Kin Dynasty, the Khitan, and the Bashpah character, a syllabic alphabet arranged, on the basis of the Tibetan and Sanskrit letters chiefly, by a learned chief Lama so-called, under the orders of Kublai, and established by edict in 1269 as the official character. Coins bearing this character, and dating from 1308 to 1354, are extant. The forms ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the age of fifteen, was little better than a young savage. He had never gone to school, he had never seen a book. But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him. He induced a friend to teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously taught himself to read. So there was something more than "poor white" in him, ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... been studying a book just published, entitled, Stenographic Sound-Hand and had learned its alphabet and practised the use of it. That evening I took down the remarks ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... was said that "a sign was made," we are to understand by it that the action was performed by her teacher, she feeling of his hands, and then imitating the motion. The next step in the process of her instruction was to procure a set of metal types, with the different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends; also a board, in which were square holes, into which she could set the types so that the letters on the end could alone be felt above the surface. Then, on any article being handed to her whose name she had learned—a ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... islander, Palamedes, son of Nauplius, or Simonides, whom some authorities credit with the measure—were not satisfied with determining merely our order of precedence in the alphabet; they also had an eye to our individual qualities and faculties. You, Vowels of the jury, constitute the first Estate, because you can be uttered independently; the semi-vowels, requiring support before they ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... learn, I opened a little day-school in the Chief's wigwam. I had a box for my seat, and the young people squatted round on mats. There was an attendance of eleven scholars. Two of the young men I found already knew the alphabet, so I set them on to commence the first book while the others were kept busy with the A, B, C. They were sharp at learning, and nearly all of them, with the exception of one or two of the youngest children, knew the capital letters and figures from 1 ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... tried harder. Metals, for instance. Somewhere there surely must be ores which they could have smelted, but he had never found them. And he might have tried catching some of the little horses they hunted for food, to break and train to bear burdens. And the alphabet—why hadn't he taught it to Bo-Bo and the daughter of Seldar Glav, and laid on them an obligation to teach the others? And the grass-seeds they used for making flour sometimes; they should have planted fields of the better kinds, ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... not half a dozen persons in that room could have perceived any difference in the two readings of a thesis written in a language of which even the alphabet was unknown known to them, yet every individual among them could keenly appreciate the magnanimity of Ishmael, who would have sacrificed his scholastic fame for his friend's benefit, and the quickness and integrity of Walter in discovering the generous ruse and ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... many other words and points that I keep all the material fresh in my mind. No good points are buried in some forgotten scrapbook; I keep reading these things until they are as familiar to me as the alphabet." ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... galleries, l. 176. The art of painting has appeared in the early state of all societies before the invention of the alphabet. Thus when the Spanish adventurers, under Cortez, invaded America, intelligence of their debarkation and movements was daily transmitted to Montezuma, by drawings, which corresponded with the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The antiquity of statuary appears from the Memnon ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... out as a fine stroke of imagination dwindles down to a sort of literary conceit. And this puerile twist, by the way, is all the poorer, when it is considered that the native writing is really from left to right, and only takes the other direction in a foreign, that is to say, a Persian alphabet. And so in other places, even where the writer is most deservedly admired for gorgeous picturesque effect, we feel that it is only the literary picturesque, a kind of infinitely glorified newspaper-reporting. Compare, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... Oklahoma still number some 26,000, though most are of mixed blood. A group, known as the Eastern Band, some 1400 strong, are on a reservation in North Carolina. Their language consists of two dialects—a third, that of the "Lower" branch, having been lost. The syllabic alphabet invented in 1821 by George Guess (Sequoyah) is the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... been recognized. All of the earlier literature of mankind treats largely of these gods, for it is an interesting fact that in the history of any civilized people, the evolution of psychotheism is approximately synchronous with the invention of an alphabet. In the earliest writings of the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and the Greeks, this stage is discovered, and Osiris, Indra, and Zeus are characteristic representatives. As psychotheism and written language appear together in ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... pump and needed some new parts made up aboard the ship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meant to start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the evening Lillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a nonphonetic, ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny to help. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the work on the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from the fields and were also watching, ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... began teaching me the alphabet, when I was thirteen years old. I had no mother and no home or friend, other than Judge S——, in whose ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... hands, though he tried to protect these by placing them under his back. Now Godfrey knew something of the inadequate and clumsy methods affected by alleged communicating spirits, and half automatically began to repeat the alphabet. When he got to the letter I, there was a loud rap. He began again, and at A came another rap. Once more he tried, for something seemed to make him do so, and was ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Grecians themselves into parties; and it was remarked that the Catholics favored the former pronunciation, the Protestants gave countenance to the new. Gardiner employed the authority of the king and council to suppress innovations in this particular, and to preserve the corrupt sound of the Greek alphabet. So little liberty was then allowed of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... Honourable, Learned, and Pious F.M. Baron of Helmont caused to be published in Latin a small Treatise; wholly and fully to the same purpose, with what is here published: Which said Treatise, entituled, The Alphabet of Nature, is now in Hand to be Translated, and Publish'd in English; of which it was thought fit here to give thee ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... given? But chiefly this, him First, him Last to view 15 Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world 20 Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow. Infinite Love, Whose latence is the plenitude of All, Thou with retracted ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... years of age, stored with knowledge and full of original power. Through reading, lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, the big manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble that stutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... concerning the names of cultivars is that they should not be in Latin, but in any modern language using the so-called Roman alphabet (i.e. the alphabet in which English, French, German, etc., are written). The reason for this is, of course, to distinguish, at a glance, names of cultivars from names of wild varieties, which are in Latin. In the future, Latin names for cultivars will definitely not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... German languages, as preliminary to an etymological dictionary he meditated, I went into explanations with him of an easy process for simplifying the study of the Anglo-Saxon, and lessening the terrors and difficulties presented by it's rude alphabet, and unformed orthography. But this is a subject beyond the bounds of a letter, as it was beyond the bounds of a report to the legislature. Mr. Crofts died, I believe, before any progress was made in the work ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... for every letter of the alphabet, each illustrated by a full page picture in colors. The verses appeal to the child's sense of humor without being foolish or sensational, and will be welcomed by kindergartners for teaching rhythm in a most ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... man. Ven you're a married man, Samivel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but vether it's worth while goin' through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o' taste. I rayther think it ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Was the sun the centre of our scheme? And Tycho told him, there is but one way To know the truth, and that's to sweep aside All the dark cobwebs of old sophistry, And watch and learn that moving alphabet, Each smallest silver character inscribed Upon the skies themselves, noting them down, Till on a day we find them taking shape In phrases, with a meaning; and, at last, The hard-won beauty of that celestial book ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... instructions—not only technical in good honest English, but interlarded with words from a language which cannot be written with our alphabet for the benefit of such as love details of a ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... with most beneficial effect. The copper-plate engravings in my father's library were the first things I sought out, especially those representing scenes in the history of the world. A table showing our (German) alphabet in its relations with many others made a surprising impression upon me. It enabled me to recognise the connection and the derivation of our letters from the old Phoenician characters. This gave ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... recovered Henry lay down to influenza on his own account. He is but just better and it looks as though Fanny were about to bring up the rear. As for me, I am all right, though I was reduced to dictating Anne in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which I think you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the velocity with which the telegraph alphabet of sounds in dots and dashes rattled over the instrument, appropriately termed a "sounder," upon which messages are received, and found herself wholly unable to write down the words as fast as ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... always smiles, and A is jolly; G's somehow sort of melancholy. Q sticks his tongue into his cheek And always waits for U to speak; D's fat and lazy; so is C; And O makes funny mouths at me. Among the pleasant alphabet It's hard to pick and choose—and yet, When all is said, I can't deny (You'll understand), my choice ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... parents' pride in the eighteen-months-old infant's knowledge of the catechism, an acquirement rewarded by the gift of a red apple, but which suggests the reason for many funerals. Or, again, difficulties with the alphabet are sorrowfully put down; and also deliquencies at the age of four in attending family prayer, with a full account of punishments meted out to the culprit. Such details are, indeed, but natural, for under ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... room in which Armand Monnier was seated, his chin propped on his hand, his elbow resting on a table, looking abstractedly into space. In a corner of the room two small children were playing languidly with a set of bone tablets, inscribed with the letters of the alphabet. But whatever the children were doing with the alphabet, they were certainly not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... many a time had to grope his way along a life-line lest the slightest deviation in direction should carry him out into the storm to perish of cold, blinded and lost? Oh, yes. This understanding was the alphabet of his life. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... he learned the letters of the string alphabet, which is used in some of the institutions for the blind in Europe. When one of his friends gave him a leaf of St. Mark's Gospel, printed in embossed characters, he endeavored to read it by passing his fingers over the letters as ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eat his dinner when hungry. "Common-sense business-habits"—his favorite phrase—he believed to be quite sufficient for the elucidation of the most difficult question in law, physic, or divinity. The science of law, especially, he held to be an alphabet which any man—of common sense and business habits—could as easily master as he could count five on his fingers; and there was no end to his ridicule of the men with horse-hair head-dresses, and ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... with me, it is true that over thirty years ago I received some remarkable communications from him, through a rapping medium, the messages being spelled out by the alphabet, and his suggestions entirely in consonance ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... of Sao Paulo is a boy, Ramiro by name, now about thirteen years of age, the only son of parents who do not know a letter of the alphabet. Indeed, he is the only one in a large connection that has been ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... the two were walking hand in hand. Wonder was one of those little girls that seem to know all the meanings of life, while yet struggling with the alphabet of its ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... treat things lightly (though, for me, Why truth may not be gay, I cannot see: Just as, we know, judicious teachers coax With sugar-plum or cake their little folks To learn their alphabet):—still, we will try A graver tone, and lay our joking by. The man that with his plough subdues the land, The soldier stout, the vintner sly and bland, The venturous sons of ocean, all declare That with one view the toils of ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... introduced between him and his book the Latin initial letter, large and illuminated, of the theme she supposed to be absorbing him, as it did herself. The unexpected vision of this accusing Captain of the Alphabet, this resplendent and haunting A. fronting him bodily, threw Ripton straight back in his chair, while Guilt, with her ancient indecision what colours to assume on detection, flew from red to white, from white to red, across his fallen chaps. Letty laughed triumphantly. Amor, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I was not disposed to go sixpence higher than three ten. They again said it was a pity, for it would be very inconvenient to them if I did not keep to something between a bishop and a poet. I might be anything I liked in reason, provided I showed proper respect for the alphabet; but they had got me between "Samuel Butler, bishop," and "Samuel Butler, poet." It would be very troublesome to shift me, and bachelor came before bishop. This was reasonable, so I replied that, under those circumstances, if they pleased, I thought I would like to be ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... been interesting to have a copy of hexameters or elegiacs by the historian of Rome. So much for Latin. In Greek he made far less progress. He had attained his nineteenth year before he learned the alphabet, and even after so late a beginning he did not prosecute ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... a sensible difference on hearing the same word sounded by two people; and, in fact, they have been observed sometimes to differ from themselves, substituting often the letter b for p, and g for c, and vice versa. In their alphabet they have neither s nor v; and some of their letters would require a new character to ascertain ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... aborigines inhabit the interior parts of North Borneo, and all along the coast is found a fringe of true Malays, talking modern Malay and using the Arabic written character, whereas the aborigines possess not even the rudiments of an alphabet and, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated class will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... little means, and a cook-general to thwart your efforts? If you have, you can imagine the list. Dusting, sewing, mending, turning, making, un-making, helping Bridgie, amusing the children, soothing the servants, humouring Dick, making dresses, trimming hats, covering cushions, teaching the alphabet, practising songs, arranging flowers, watering plants, going to shops, making up parcels, writing ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... and sour and ready to quarrel with everything. I don't know; but I think sometimes it's them Greek classics, as they call them. You see, it's such unchristian-like looking stuff. I have looked at them sometimes in the Doctor's study. Such heathen-looking letters; not a bit like a decent alphabet. But there, I must be off, gentlemen. I have all my work waiting, and I am going away—only think of it!—ten pounds richer than when I first began to turn that there handle this morning, if—if I stop here—I mean, if we stop here till you young ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... fast increasing learning little fitted him to drill peasant children in the alphabet. "When I kept school the boys kept me," he used to confess with a merry twinkle. In all that our Lord meant by it William Carey was a child from first to last. The former teacher returned, and the ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... answered her, speaking more lightly than he felt. "What a numskull you make, Grizel, of any man who presumes to write about women! I am at school again, and you are Miss Ailie teaching me the alphabet. But I thought you lost that serious little girl on the doleful day when she heard you say that you loved ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... the teacher to the class which had witnessed the experiment, "that this boy knows his Alphabet, in a different sense, from that in which he knows his Multiplication table. In the latter, his knowledge is only imperfectly his own; he can make use of it only under favorable circumstances. In the former it is entirely ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... learn anything!" cried Lovey Mary, recklessly. "Already know the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer backward. Is the dress short- sleeve? And does it drag in the back ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... Chapters V, VI, and XII of Book I should be reviewed at frequent intervals until their contents become as familiar as the alphabet. This result can be obtained only by time and persistency. Before it is reached, the average pupil will have learned and forgotten over and over again the material involved. These chapters may sometimes be reviewed as ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... comprised in a mere avoidance of sin. It regards the strictest morality as an indispensable feature of every religious system claiming in any degree divine recognition; and yet it looks upon morality as but the alphabet from which the words and sentences of a truly religious life may be framed. However euphonious the words, however eloquent the periods, to make the writing of highest worth there must be present the divine thought; and this, man ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... battle, entered the bank. He had never been in a London bank before. At first it reminded him of the club, with the addition of an enormous placard giving the day of the month as a mystical number—14—and other placards displaying solitary letters of the alphabet. Then he saw that it was a huge menagerie in which highly trained young men of assorted sizes and years were confined in stout cages of wire and mahogany. He stamped straight to a cage with a hole in it, and threw down the cheque ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... and substantial strength. Another still more exquisite combination of rosewood, velvet, spiral springs, and cunning floral carving, presenting a striking resemblance to that great ornament of the English alphabet, the letter S, held Miss Millicent Hopkins, in one curve, face to face with Mr. Chipworth Dartmouth, already known to the reader, in the other. Near by the half-recumbent millionnaire, at a little gem of a lady's writing-desk, sat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... or rather the sound of A as in full, is the initial letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. Of compounds, the Dwanda, or the copulative compound, is enumerated first. In other respects again, the Dwanda is the best kind of compound for the words forming it are co-ordinate, without one being dependent on ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... every evening before his tent, where, by the light of a large fire made of brushwood and cow's dung, they are taught a few sentences from the Koran, and are initiated into the principles of their creed. Their alphabet differs but little from that in Richardson's Arabic Grammar. They always write with the vowel points. Their priests even affect to know something of foreign literature. The priest of Benowm assured me that he could read the writings of the Christians: he showed me a number of barbarous ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... utter futility of attempting to convince Aunt Comfort that she was in the wrong, by anything short of a miracle, the teacher wisely skipped over the obnoxious letter, then all went smoothly on to the conclusion of the alphabet. ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... from the point to be explained by exciting his interest in the special fact of the illustration. Clearly, too, so far as Logic is formal, no particular matter of fact can adequately illustrate any of its doctrines. Accordingly, writers on Logic employ letters of the alphabet instead of concrete terms, (say) X instead of salt or instead of iron, and (say) Y instead of soluble or instead of rusted by water; and then a proposition may be represented by X is Y. It is still more usual to represent a proposition by S is (or is not) P, S being the initial ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... shores of the Persian Gulf to the lands washed by the Mediterranean, of mythological notions and ideas. It is a probable conjecture that among the primitive tribes who dwelt on the Tigris and Euphrates, when the cuneiform alphabet was invented and when such writing was first applied to the purposes of religion, a Scythic or Scytho-Arian race existed, who subsequently migrated to Europe, and brought with them those mythical traditions which, as objects of popular belief, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... out of their zigzag beds, jumped onto the rails with their zigzag legs and spit and twisted till they spit and twisted all the rails and the ties and the spikes back into a zigzag like the letter Z and the letter Z at the end of the alphabet. ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... wonder, then, that the soul has the same uncertainty about the alphabet of things, and sometimes and in some cases is firmly fixed by the truth in each particular, and then, again, in other cases is altogether at sea; having somehow or other a correct notion of combinations; but when the elements ...
— Statesman • Plato
... periods, as do plants and trees; and some races flower later than others. This architecture was the first flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent not by imaged words and vitalized alphabet; they vitalized stone, and their poets ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... the word memory is too unlimited for our purpose: those ideas which we voluntarily recall are here termed ideas of recollection, as when we will to repeat the alphabet backwards. And those ideas which are suggested to us by preceding ideas are here termed ideas of suggestion, as whilst we repeat the alphabet in the usual order; when by habits previously acquired B is suggested by A, and C by B, without ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... this kind, in which even the names of their leaders are mentioned, is of no more value than the traditions of other barbarous nations which were unacquainted with the art of writing. It is indeed, well known that the Celts in writing used the Greek alphabet, but they probably employed it only in the transactions of daily life; for we know that they were not allowed to commit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... right or left. If the current enters at X, it will pass along C and out at Y, when C is pressed down. By moving C up and down according to a previously arranged set of signals, messages can be sent by means of the electric current. (See telegraph alphabet.) This apparatus is not a good one where the line is to be run with a "closed circuit battery," or where it is to be used very often. It will do, however, for places where a push-button would be too tiresome to use. The right end of C is curved. This curve ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... occupied with Freddie. The little boy knew his alphabet, but nothing more, so that his young teacher had to begin with him at the beginning ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... say, Darby," returned the other, "that it's a kind of universal spelling-book amongst us, and so it is—an alphabet aisily larned. Your health, now and under all circumstances! Teddy, or Thaddeus, I drink to your symmetry and inexplicable proportions; and I say for your comfort, my worthy distillator, that if you are not so refulgent in beauty as Venus, you ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... boy liked this manner of learning to read very much. Each day he passed some hours, sometimes in the cabin, sometimes on the deck, in arranging and disarranging the letters of his alphabet. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... ways, either on account of some bodily transformation (as in the case of people who are asleep or out of their senses), or through the coordination of the phantasms, at the command of reason, for the purpose of understanding something. For just as the various arrangements of the letters of the alphabet convey various ideas to the understanding, so the various coordinations of the phantasms produce various ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... You like syllables of sound in unmeaning rotation, and you despise its words, its purposes, its narrative feats; carry out your principle, it will show you where you are. Buy a dirty palette for a picture, and dream the alphabet is a poem." ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... text of a few leaves which nobody understood yet. This much had the investigators already worked out; that the characters were the same that the Arabs employed in their secret correspondence, and the alphabet was that known among Orientalists as "Lijakah." On the other hand, the words which the letters formed were not to be found in any speech of any known people on the whole globe. One linguist insisted that he recognized the Arabic, ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... had even appeared in the almanac! But in Banbury they were all new, and so funny that everybody laughed till their sides ached. And the wonderful horses! Madame Orley's educated steed, which picked out letters from a card alphabet and spelled words with them, went through the military drill with the precision of a trooper, and waltzed about the arena with his mistress on his back!—well, he was not a horse; he was a wizard steed, like the one described in the "Arabian Nights ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... deficiency of syntax, of gender and case; a want of vigour in sound; a too great precision of expression, rendering it clumsy and unwieldy; and an absence of exceptions, which give beauty and variety to speech. The people have never invented any form of alphabet, yet the abundance of tale, legend, and proverb which their dialect contains might repay ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... ceiling. As long as the diagrams were just designs on paper, Lenny Poe could pick them up fine. Which meant that everything was jim-dandy as long as the wiring diagrams were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet. The labels were just more squiggles to be copied as a ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Part of this Paper, we find that besides their containing many Things abstruse or insignificant to us, it will probably be fifty Years before the Whole can be gone thro' in this Manner of Publication. There are likewise in those Books continual References from Things under one Letter of the Alphabet to those under another, which relate to the same Subject, and are necessary to explain and compleat it; those are taken in their Turn may perhaps be Ten Years distant; and since it is likely that they who desire to acquaint themselves with ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... restriction, but may be applied to action, state, material, extent, enumeration, or to whatever else may be conceived of as having a first part, point, degree, etc. The letter A is at the beginning (not the commencement) of every alphabet. If we were to speak of the commencement of the Pacific Railroad, we should be understood to refer to the enterprise and its initiatory act; if we were to refer to the roadway we should say "Here is the beginning ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... him and he felt, in a sickness of despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Dr. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, dean of the Junior Women's College of the University of Chicago, Mrs. Park said that she had half the letters of the alphabet attached to her name representing degrees. Dr. Breckinridge also paid a tribute of gratitude to the National Suffrage Association and began her address: "My faith has three articles. I believe it is the right ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... They have no relation to each other. You mistake the occasion for the cause, the means for the motive. Your alphabet is in fault. Such a set of vain, frivolous, dishonest, mean, hypocritical, and insufferably vulgar letters would be turned out of any respectable, well-bred spelling-book. Vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, meanness, hypocrisy, and vulgarity can be exhibited ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... ALPHABET. It was Athenodo'rus the Stoic who advised Augustus to repeat the alphabet when he felt inclined to give way ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... nimble was her intelligence! In that one morning she learned all our alphabet and how to write our letters. It appeared that among her people, at any rate in their later periods, the only form of writing that was used was a highly concentrated shorthand which saved labour. They had no ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Eriksen! He understands the deaf-and-dumb alphabet!" they shouted. The stranger shrugged ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Lovelace's time was the application of letters, of the alphabet or otherwise, to the purpose of expressing the sounds or notes ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... Greek system little is known beyond the fact that the letters of the alphabet were used to represent pitches. This method was probably accurate enough, but it was cumbersome, and did not afford any means of writing "measured music" nor did it give the eye any opportunity of grasping the general ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... lines and a pattern in relief, supposed to be of the fifth or sixth century. The sculptured stones of Meigle in Scotland have no runes. Runes were, as it is well known, the characters used by the Teutonic tribes of northwest Europe before they received the Latin alphabet. They are divided into three principal classes, the Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic, and the Scandinavian, bearing the same relation to each other as do the different Greek alphabets. Their likeness to each other is so great that a common origin may be ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... a sheet of vellum or paper used in early times for teaching the rudiments of education, on which were inscribed the alphabet in black or Roman letters, some monosyllables, the Lord's Prayer, and the Roman numerals; this sheet was covered with a slice of transparent horn, and was still in use in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Meanwhile let me know everything that happens as soon as you possibly can. Telegraph to me at 145 Jermyn Street. You can send in the messages to Tilbury by the man who's looking after your boat. Use some quick simple cypher—suppose we say the alphabet backwards, Z for A and so on. Have you got plenty ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... applicable to all events, does not give us the 'slightest aid' to determining, independently of experience, any particular event. We observe that B follows A, but, for all we can say, it might as well follow any other letter of the alphabet. Yet we are entitled to say in general that it does uniformly follow some particular letter. The metaphor which describes cause and effect as a 'bond' tying A and B together is perfectly appropriate if taken to express ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... you'd better say," the doctor retorted curtly. "What's more, you lay awake to read them? Three quarters of the night? Yes? I thought so. Next time, though, I'll trouble you to let your signs alone. You've got to learn their alphabet straight, before you go to work to get much meaning out of them. Anyway, they are my care, not yours." Then, as the pulse steadied down a little, the doctor spoke more gently. "Boy, what is it that you ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, isn't it, as my ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... that it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... In fact, I seemed to do it of myself, constrained thereto by what the Emperor Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year, we had a parlor with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... for a mile or more, and then, judging with a long tack he could weather the southerly side of the island he put the boat about. He took occasion to explain to Helen how this operation was necessary, and she learned the alphabet of navigation. The western end of their little land now lay before them; it was about three miles in breadth. For two miles the bluff coast line continued unbroken; then a deep bay, a mile in width and two miles in depth, was made by a long ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... man procured a better knife, with which he was enabled to give a more graceful form to his [C with square sides], by rounding it into C; then two such, turned different ways, with a distinguishing cut between them, made CD, to express a thousand; and as, by that time, the alphabet was introduced, they recognised the similarity of the form at which they had thus arrived to the first letter of Mille, and called it M, or 1000. The half of this DC was adopted by a ready analogy for 500. With that discovery the invention of the Romans ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun. Nature tells me I am the Image of God, as well as Scripture: he that understands not thus much, hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the Alphabet of man. Let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say I am as happy as any: Ruat coelum, Fiat voluntas tua, salveth all; so that whatsoever happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire. In brief, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... towards us is authority or the right to command. Our first obligation as well as our highest honor as creatures is to obey. And until we understand this sort of liberty, we live in a world of enigmas and know not the first letter of the alphabet of creation. We are not free ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... account is given is what is called the language of symbols. Just as here we have words which stand for things—as the word "table" is a symbol for a recognised article of a certain kind—so do symbols stand for objects on higher planes. They are a pictorial alphabet, used by all myth-writers, and each has its recognised meaning. A symbol is used to signify a certain object just as words are used down here to distinguish one thing from another, and so a knowledge ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... only that Bep and Fom, in the midst of a finger conversation carried on politely with a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, had had their attention attracted by the ghastly word-picture made so vivid by their father's voice. So, wearying of the innocuous desuetude of things, it occurred to them to present for Frank's entertainment a bodily representation of what the words meant to their minds. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... thereto by what the Emperor Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year we had a parlor with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that kept out all the light that was not already ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... call out the secret of his letter, the clerks themselves would veil their faces and forget the postal alphabet. A painful silence reigns over this scene of anxious waiting; at long intervals a hoarse voice calls out his Christian name, and woe to its owner if his ancestors have not bequeathed him a short or ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... that's the reason I aint smart. I can write, though, better'n some of the boys up at school. I saw lots of names on the shed door. See here now," and scrambling down, Ben pulled out a cherished bit of chalk and flourished off ten letters of the alphabet, one on each of the dark stone slabs that paved ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... given us to see Titans enslaved by man; Steam harnessed to our carriages and ships; Galvanism tamed into an alphabet—a Gamut, and its metal harp-strings stretched across the earth malgre' mountains and the sea, and so men's minds defying the twin monsters Time and Space; and now, gold revealed in the East and West at once, and so mankind now first in earnest ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... certain that the art of writing was known among the Chinese as early as 2000 B.C. The system employed is curiously cumbrous. In the absence of an alphabet, each word of the language is represented upon the written page by means of a symbol, or combination of symbols; this, of course, requires that there be as many symbols, or characters, as there are words in the language. The number sanctioned by good use is about 25,000; but counting obsolete ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... The witch was a clean and decent-looking girl about twenty, rather thin, and apparently very exhausted; gradually a party of ten assembled, and we gathered round the witch's table. The majority were ladies—those adorers of the marvellous! The names of friends were called for; the ladies took the alphabet, and running over it with the point of a pencil, the spirit rapped as the wished-for letter was reached. John Davis was soon spelt, each letter probably having been indicated by the tremulous touch of affectionate hope. Harriet Mercer ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... successive tones (from two to four or five in number) that will convey a definite musical impression, as miniature musical idea, is called a Figure. Assuming the single tone to represent the same unit of expression as a letter of the alphabet, the melodic figure would be defined as the equivalent of a complete (small) word;—pursuing the comparison further, a series of figures constitutes the melodic Motive, equivalent to the smallest group ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... write, but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if you read them, "kind o' fables," as the country folk said. ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... composition. The early printed books often adopted a similar style in art, and we give two curious specimens. The letter F, whimsically composed of two figures of minstrels (Fig. 68), one playing the trumpet and the other the tabor, is copied from an alphabet, entirely composed in this manner, and now preserved in the British Museum; it bears no date, but the late Mr. William Young Ottley, keeper of the prints there, was of opinion that it was executed about the middle of the fifteenth century. This quaint ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... upon his artistic education. She carried him hither and thither, to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Salon, insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should worship all that she worshipped—no matter if he did not understand!—let him worship all the same—till he had learnt his new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself most especially on knowledge, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but to no purpose: his name is unknown, and his works are nothing worth. Let him once make a hit, as it is termed, and it is no longer hit or miss with him: he getteth a reputation, and he lieth in bed all day: he shaketh the alphabet in a bag, calling it his last new work, and it goeth through three editions in as many days: he lordeth it over "the trade," and will let nobody have any profit but himself: he turneth up his nose at the man who invites him to a plain dinner, and utterly refuseth evening parties: he holdeth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... his children, and, in order to do this easily, he thinks fit to retain his present instructor, who is not very learned, but who takes part in their games and joyous sports with wonderful facility, who points out the letters of the alphabet to the little girl, who takes the little boys to mass, and who, no less obliging than the worthy Abbe P. of our acquaintance, would readily dance for Madame's amusement. Such a profession would not suit you, you who have a free, proud, and manly soul: you are refused; let us dismiss the matter ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... parents toward our little boy. He never stepped inside of a school-house until he was seven years old, and, when he did so, it was to stay only a brief while. It was six months before he became acquainted with every letter of the alphabet, and no youngster of his years ever ruined more clothing than he. The destruction of shoes, hats, and trousers was enough to bankrupt many a father, and it often provoked a protest from his mother. I have seen him, within a half hour after having his face scrubbed until it shone like ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... illumination grew originally out of the decoration of the initial letters, our next point to notice is the penmanship. The alphabet which we now use is that formerly used by the Romans, who borrowed it from the Greeks, who in turn obtained it (or their modification of it) from the Phoenicians, who, lastly it is said, constructed it from that of the Egyptians. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... animal with feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... about the invention of the alphabet and the history of bookmaking up to the invention of movable types. 62 pp.; ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... afternoon she was at the general post-office applying to Q. Y. Z., who had the education of two interesting orphans to negotiate for, and who was naturally desirous of doing it as economically as possible; and at night she was at home, writing modest, business-like epistles to every letter in the alphabet in every conceivable or inconceivable part ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... becomes to the infant mind the symbol of the letter A, just as, in after life, the letter becomes, to the more advanced mind, the symbol of a certain sound of the human voice.[40] The first lesson received by a child in acquiring his alphabet is thus conveyed by symbolism. Even in the very formation of language, the medium of communication between man and man, and which must hence have been an elementary step in the progress of human improvement, it was found ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... help us any," she replied colourlessly. "There were simply the words 'northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place,' and the signature that we had agreed upon, the two first and two last letters of the alphabet transposed—BAZY." ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... combinations of characters that stood for these words in the Egyptian. The letters p, t, and l were in both names. The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three letters. That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the rest of the alphabet soon followed. Justly great is the fame of the Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... is no discussion. And yet my midnight philosophy stands the test of my breed. I must have selected my books out of the ten thousand generations that compose me. I have killed a man—Steve Roberts. As a perishing blond without an alphabet I should have done this unwaveringly. As a perishing blond with an alphabet, plus the contents in my brain of the philosophizing of all philosophers, I have killed this same man with the same unwaveringness. Culture has not emasculated me. I am quite ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Apostles did not directly teach the primitive believers that wars, and theatres, and games, and slavery, are sinful, it is because they thought it more fit to exercise their ignorant pupils chiefly in the mere alphabet and syllables of Christianity. (Acts xv, 28, 29.) The construction of words and sentences would naturally follow. The rudiments of the gospel, if once possessed by them, would be apt to lead them on to greater attainments. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to write, could he have imitated his master's hand, and would he have lost his head for mistaking another man's name for his own? a little reflection shows us he would not. Now, as for the other art, could the people read bad books had they never learned the alphabet? If there is a man present who can say to the contrary, I absolve him from his respect, and invite him to speak boldly, for there is no Inquisition in Vaud, but we invite argument. This is a free ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... the wafer and pared off three of the four edges, which showed black where they had been fused. Unfolding it, he found, as he had expected, that the pyrographed message within was in the alphabet and language of the First ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... can in large capital letters. But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a group in the sunshine, which lay with softness upon the short grass and the little pine trees. The dead lay huddled, while over them flitted the butterflies. Ashby's surgeons were busy with the wounded. A man with a shattered jaw was making signs, deliberately talking in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which perhaps he had learned for some friend or relative's sake. A younger man, his hand clenched over a wound in the breast, said monotonously, over and over again, "I am from Trenton, New Jersey, I am from Trenton, New Jersey." A third with glazing eyes made ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the same path when the Empire and the ancient world lay in ruins about her. Basil was not studious. Long ago he had forgotten his 'grammatical' learning—except, of course, a few important matters known to all educated men, such as the fact that the alphabet was invented by Mercury, who designed the letters from figures made in their flight by the cranes of Strymon. Though so ardent a lover, he had composed no lyric or elegy in Veranilda's honour; his last poetical effort was made in his sixteenth year, when, to his own joy, and to the admiration of ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... the words. They read rapidly; and you should see them blush, poor little things, when they make a mistake. And they write, too, without ink. They write on a thick and hard sort of paper with a metal bodkin, which makes a great many little hollows, grouped according to a special alphabet; these little punctures stand out in relief on the other side of the paper, so that by turning the paper over and drawing their fingers across these projections, they can read what they have written, and also the writing of others; ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... for the difficulty of drawing them, which takes time and patience, I would almost say that they are more suitable than the Latin alphabet. The ancient Egyptian had our vowels; our o, which is only final and is not like that of the Spanish, which is a vowel between o and u. Like us, the Egyptians lacked the true sound of e, and in their language are found our ha and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to enable the learner to examine, analyze and criticise his writing, the following principles are given as his standards of measurements and form. By combining them in various ways the essential part of all letters in the alphabet may be formed. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... signify, whether you retained them or not? In cases where you might have been foolish without peril you were wise; when nonsense and bigotry threaten you with destruction, it is impossible to bring you back to the alphabet of justice and common sense. If men are to be fools, I would rather they were fools in little matters than in great; dulness turned up with temerity is a livery all the worse for the facings; and the most tremendous of all things is the magnanimity ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... even know your alphabet? How funny it will be to see Miss Magin sitting up like a forsaken owl, calling out A, and A you will softly say; then B, and C, and so on. If you had learned to read, you would have to pore over books all the time. Nothing but books! I could learn more, rambling about ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... ethical fact for him; chemical reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest chemistry that can extract ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... always look at these sort of things from every point of view. Start with a conviction of the man's guilt, and you'll go hunting up evidence to bolster that conviction. My plan is to begin at the beginning; learn the alphabet of the case, and work up ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Varvilliers were there to—shall I say to take the edge off me?—but cared not a jot to meet me in his absence. The latter circumstance is simply and conventionally explained (and, after all, these conventional expressions are no more arbitrary than the alphabet, which is admitted to be a useful means of communicating our ideas) by saying that Elsa was falling in love with Varvilliers; my own state of mind would deserve analysis, but for a haunting notion that no states of mind are worth such trouble. Let us leave it; there it was. It was impossible ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Heaven, and that he had consecrated his own Church of St. Peter, Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add any ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... that by religious ordinance the translation of the Koran into any other tongue was a sin. 'The Nationalists,' he tells us, 'have cut themselves off from the superstitious prejudice.' A further attempt was made to substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in the alphabet, but this seems to have presented insuperable difficulties, and I gather that ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... indoctrinate him according to his capacity, and to spare nothing to that end.' He, accordingly, put Pantagruel under a great teacher, who began by bringing him up after the fashion of those times. He taught him his charte (alphabet) to such purpose that he could say it by heart backwards, and he was five years and three months about it. Then he read with him Donotus and Facetus (old elementary works on Latin grammar), and he was thirteen ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... is produced, and into it are thrown little lots about the size of a bean, with letters on them. Two are marked alpha [Footnote: The Greek alphabet runs: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.], two beta, two more gamma, and so on, if the competitors run to more than that—two lots always to each ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... any of these single gentlemen who want an airy bedroom, with the occasional use of a parlour, ever appear to come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes' walk of the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the number of times they are asked to do it and don't. It really seems,' said Tom, relinquishing ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... History 2. Prehistoric Peoples 3. Domestication of Animals and Plants 4. Writing and the Alphabet 5. Primitive Science ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... could not speak it. For at times she rejected the professional dictum of the doctor that the faculty of memory was wholly paralyzed or held in abeyance, even to the half-automatic recollection of his letters, yet she inconsistently began to teach him the alphabet with the same method, and—in her sublime unconsciousness of his manhood—with the same discipline as if he were a very child. When he had recovered sufficiently to leave his room, she would lead ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... of loading and unloading ships can be carried on without any interruption. If everything that the Penny Numbers told of were as true to the life as that, the world's wonders (at least those of them which begin with the first four letters of the alphabet) must be all that I had hoped; and perhaps that bee-hive about which Master Isaac and I had had our jokes, did really yield a "considerable income" to ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Korea, alphabet; architecture; artisans; Buddhism; China, relations with; chronology; language; music; myth; pottery, sepulchral; scholars; treasury, Japanese; early intercourse with Japan; Jingo's conquest; granary; Japanese relations in 540-645; ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering characters in them. In reading such a book as Under Western Eyes we feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it has not been used to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... names have never been heard by the people—of France—even as Phoenicia, in the wanderings of her adventurous son, Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the godmother of Greek culture and of European literature. Palamedes and Simonides added some letters to the alphabet brought, according to tradition, by Cadmus to Greece, and Cadmus suffered the doom of those who sow dragon's teeth, as France has suffered, but still is his name kept in the memory of every school child; and so should be remembered those who planted the lead ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... old boss brought me to Arkansas when I was bout twelve years old. Biggest education I got, sit down with my old boss and he'd make me learn the alphabet. In those times they used the old ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... although she had not yet dared to look at him. But her little hand lay unreprovingly in his,—nestling like a timid bird which loved to be there, and sought not to escape. He pressed it gently to his heart; he felt by its magnetic touch, by that dumb alphabet of love, more eloquent than spoken words, that he had won the heart ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which after the discovery of the alphabet were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome. Allusions to those fables were therefore thought proper ornaments to a philosophical poem, and are occasionally introduced ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... assured herself that she could love no one but Francis Sales, that was no reason why others should not love her. From that point of view John Batty was a failure. He took her to a cricket match, but finding that she did not know the alphabet of the game, and was more interested in the spectators than in the players, he gave her up. He admired her appearance, but it did not make amends for ignorance of such a grossness; and, equally displeased with him, she returned home alone while ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the whole world's school The lesson it will surely read, That each one ruled has right to rule — The alphabet of Freedom's creed Which slowly wins it proselytes And makes uneasier many a throne; You taught them all to prate of Rights In language growing like ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... if R.C. is not too sanguine. I never saw so much reason for indulging hope. By the bye, I am admitted a member of the Maitland Club, a Society on the principle of the Roxburghe and Bannatyne. What a tail of the alphabet I should draw after me were I to sign with the indications of the different societies I belong to, beginning with President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and ended with umpire of the Six-foot-high Club![267] Dined at home, and in quiet, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... without wheat? Certainly, and live well. We must recognize the scientific fact that no one food (with the exception of milk) is indispensable. There are four letters in the food alphabet: A, fuel for the body machine; B, protein for the upkeep of the machinery; C, mineral salts, partly for upkeep and partly for lubrication—to make all parts work smoothly together; D, vitamines, subtle and elusive substances upon whose presence depends ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... her text, her career was ever marked with deeds of kindness and charity to the oppressed of every class. Taking an active part in both the "Anti-slavery" and "Woman's Rights" struggles, she early learned the very alphabet of liberty. With her the perception of its blessings and its glory was also a rich inheritance, and the vigilance and courage to conquer and secure it for others was not less a noble legacy. The love of liberty flowed down to her through two streams ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... said that it is also called NTZCH, Netzach, the neighboring letters (M and N, neighboring letters in the alphabet, that is, and allied in sense, for Mem Water, and Nun Fish, that which lives in the water) being counter-changed. (Netzach Victory, and is the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... a prominent feature that rising intonation, passing sometimes almost into a wail, which one hears all along the eastern Border. But the great outstanding characteristic of Berwick speech is the burr a rough guttural pronunciation of the letter "i." With nothing but the scanty resources of our alphabet to fall back upon, it is quite impossible to represent this peculiarity phonetically, but it was once remarked by a student of Semitic tongues that the sound of the Hebrew letter 'Ayin is as nearly as possible that of the burr, and that, if you want to ascertain the correct ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that nothing matters—nothing ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to which Richard was shown was called "Barrack B." There were ten rooms of this kind, known by the first ten letters of the alphabet, omitting J. Each barrack contained twenty narrow iron bedsteads, and no two boys were allowed to occupy the same bed. At the head of each barrack, there was an alcove large enough to contain the bed of the assistant teacher, who had charge ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... rapping started slowly, and distinctly to spell out words. It was so weird and uncanny that I scarcely breathed. Letter after letter the message came, nineteen raps for "s," eight for "h," five for "e," according to the place in the alphabet, numerically, of the required letter. At ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... present to shadow forth symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself understandable to intelligence—the alphabet by means of which all spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another. Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they transport me into the active state of their ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... were so very illiterate when they were called to Britain by Vortigern, in Welsh, Gwrtheyrn, that they could neither write nor read. And for that reason Messengers were sent to them from Britain, with a verbal Invitation. Mr. Llwyd has proved that the Welsh furnished the Anglo-Saxons with an Alphabet. See a Welsh Book entitled Drych y prif Oesoedd, "a view of the Primitive Ages," by the above named Mr. Theophilus Evans. p. 96. note. Edit. 2. and ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... disconcerting to talk about the ABCs, if the group already knows the alphabet. To devote any great part of a presentation to matters which the majority present already well understand is to assure that the main object will receive very little serious attention. Thus in talking about the school of the rifle, only a fool would start by explaining what part of it was the trigger ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... hers now. It's an alphabet, all about us down here. Kitty wrote it, but she says Uncle Steve helped her a little bit with some of the lines. It's ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... them seeming to be as nearly destitute of the number sense as it is possible for a human being to be. The Bushmen[43] of South Africa have but two numerals, the pronunciation of which can hardly be indicated without other resources than those of the English alphabet. Their word for 3 means, simply, many, as in the case of some of the Australian tribes. The Watchandies[44] have but two simple numerals, and their entire number system is cooteon, 1, utaura, 2, utarra cooteoo, 3, atarra utarra, 4. Beyond this they can ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... little hut were suspended various pictures for study, upon which I taught them to read according to the method of mutual assistance. A bed of sand, smoothed upon a small bench, served the younger ones to trace and understand the letters of the alphabet: the others wrote upon slates. We bestowed nearly two hours upon each exercise, and then my scholars amused themselves at different games. At three o'clock, all returned to the cotton field, and remained till five. ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... had a signalling competition amongst the companies. Each company had been teaching all the men the semaphore code. It is a good thing to start with, but at the Front they use only the Morse system. About seventy-five per cent. of the men of the regiment could read the semaphore alphabet very readily. When a warship sent a signal everybody on board read it. "H" ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... Lillyworth and I don't seem to be very affectionate towards each other, though we get along very well together. But Mulgrum wrote out for me that he was born in Cherryfield, Maine, and obtained his education as a deaf mute in Hartford. I learned the deaf and dumb alphabet when I was a schoolmaster, as a pastime, and I had some practice with it in the house ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... always using the abbreviation, both in writing and speaking. "She always calls him H," said Grandma Cobb, "and I tell her sometimes it doesn't look quite respectful to speak to her husband as if he were part of the alphabet." Grandma Cobb, if the truth had been told, was always in a state of covert rebellion against ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he never forgot. It was ever his inspiration, his alphabet with which he wrote the spirit of his composition, but it was a classic thought played upon with the most talented of variations. Pure Greek was too cold and chaste for the temper of the time in which he lived and worked and ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... admirably is a gift indispensable to a lady. Alas! I fear that those little feet of yours—I hope they are small—have never been taught to move in a coranto or a contre-danse, and that you will have to learn the alphabet of dancing at an age when most women are finished performers. The great Conde, while winning sieges and battles that surpassed the feats of Greeks and Romans, contrived to make himself the finest dancer of his day, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... understand you, and on top of it she will imagine that what you are teaching is of no earthly use to her. In two or three weeks you will try your hand on another Lukeria, and meanwhile you will be washing a baby here, teaching another the alphabet, or handing some sick man his medicine. That will ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... keeps a great number of Catholic children away from the schools, the education of the lower classes in Holland is in a condition that any European state might envy. In proportion, Holland contains less people who do not know their alphabet than does Prussia. "Of all Europe," as a Dutch writer has said with just pride, although he judges his country severely on other points, "Holland is the land where all such knowledge as is indispensable to civilized man is most widely diffused." I was once greatly surprised, on asking a Dutchman ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... magnitudes with constellations was introduced by Bayer in 1603, and is still adhered to. According to this the stars in each constellation, beginning with the brightest star, are designated by the letters of the Greek alphabet taken in their usual order. For example, in the constellation of Canis Major, or the Greater Dog, the brightest star is the well-known Sirius, called by the ancients the "Dog Star"; and this star, in accordance with Bayer's method, has received the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... early and toward evening, and as to which they persuade themselves that it is the most efficacious safeguard against idolatry, fortified wherewith they can not lapse from true to false religion. The other secret alphabet consisted in this, that in inversed order they change the last letter [Hebrew: T] with the first [Hebrew: '], and this and another in turn, and so on through the rest, which inversion it is the custom to call ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... sentences, since it was not always possible to get a consistent answer to the question as to what part of a sentence constitutes a single word, and time was too limited for any extensive language study. The following alphabet has been used ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... "Monkery being extinguished above eighty or ninety years, and the Lord General's name being Monk, is the dead man. The royal G or C (it is gamma in the Greek, intending C in the Latin, being the third letter in the alphabet) is Charles II., who, for his extraction, may be said to be of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... never attended school or been privately taught in her life. And she can't write or even form the letters of the alphabet, but she gave her interviewer a very convincing demonstration of her ability to read. When asked how she mastered the art of reading, she replied: "The Lord ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... similar dream, and has further heard that the first elements are names only, and that definition or explanation begins when they are combined; the letters are unknown, the syllables or combinations are known. But this new hypothesis when tested by the letters of the alphabet is found to break down. The first syllable of Socrates' name is SO. But what is SO? Two letters, S and O, a sibilant and a vowel, of which no further explanation can be given. And how can any one be ignorant of either ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... men intend always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated class will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... telegraph, by which he can communicate with far off friends, telling them where an enemy is, and how or when he should be "struck." A single spark, or smoke, has in it much of meaning. A flash may mean more; but ten following in succession were alphabet enough to tell a tale of no common kind—one, it ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... seized it with avidity. That language had never been totally extinct in Italy; but at the time on which we are touching, there were not probably six persons in the whole country acquainted with it. Dante had quoted Greek authors, but without having known the Greek alphabet. The person who favoured Petrarch with this coveted instruction was Bernardo Barlaamo, a Calabrian monk, who had been three years before at Avignon, having come as envoy from Andronicus, the eastern Emperor, on pretext of proposing a union between the Greek and Roman churches, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... thing that was eccentric, and by no means a miser of my eccentricities; every one was welcome to a share of them, and I had plenty to spare after having freighted the company. Some sweetmeats easily bribed me home with him. I learned from poor Boyse my alphabet and my grammar, and the rudiments of the classics. He taught me all he could, and then sent me to the school at Middleton. In short, he made a man of me. I recollect it was about five and thirty years afterwards, when I had risen to some eminence at the bar, and when I had a seat ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... him, he was convinced, thoroughly well. I once put to him a question in connection with this to which he replied in almost exactly the words he placed five years later in the mouth of David Copperfield: "I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to present themselves before me as ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... moment advertising the most undesirable article in the world, a commodity for which I can conceive of no demand whatever. Yet there—the result of the caprice of adhesive cement or the desire of one letter of the alphabet to get level with its neighbour and be dropped too—the amazing notice is, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... last: undergoing a certain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them, even at this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old—girl or boy—whoever you may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet; then get good dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, hunt it down ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... man in the Colony. It was his idea that some time I should write the work instead; upon the Sacondaga hills, he said, we saw and read the heavens without Old-World dust in our eyes, and our book that was to be should teach the European moles the very alphabet of planets. Alas! I also was too indolent—truly, not figuratively; the book ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... The A B C; this rubi'y, though indescribably beautiful in the Original, is somewhat too involved for us to grasp the meaning at one reading. Perhaps, in thus weaving the alphabet into his numbers, it was the purpose of the poet to give promise of the ultimate attainment of the Alpha and Omega of knowledge. Perhaps the stanza, on the other hand, was merely intended as a pretty poetical conceit, an exercise in metrical ingenuity. If the latter ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... each Sabbath for the others to memorize. To make this task of memorization easier many of the Jewish hymns were written in acrostic form—that is, each line or stanza began with a different letter in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... when we reflect on their enormous superiority in artillery and equipment, that is a great tribute to the strategy of the Grand Duke in conducting the most difficult retreat of modern times. Germany, though a mistress of the entire alphabet of frightfulness, is making increasing play with the U's and Z's, and Admiral Percy Scott, who predicted the dangers of the former, is now entrusted with the task of coping with the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... positive child it is! Well, then, it shall not be forced to say the a, b, c, of Cupid's alphabet, to that terrible pedagogue, Clarence Hervey, till it pleases: but seriously, Miss Portman, I am concerned that you will make me take this draught: it is absolutely robbing you. But Lord Delacour's the person you must blame—it is all his obstinacy: ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... miscalled firmness, which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was kept at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to learn, and willing enough, when my mother and I had lived alone together. I can faintly remember learning the alphabet at her knee. To this day, when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present themselves again before me as they used to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... F. say about them?" asked the Pen. "He ought to know the alphabet of Parliamentary portraiture at all events ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of the figures would change, or a single letter of the alphabet would shift. And so on, column after column. Bob had not the remotest notion of what it all meant, but he copied it and handed the result to Harvey. In ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... source of great joy to my cousin to see that on these occasion the managers know how to put the critics in their proper places, grouping them, for instance, in rows of stalls bearing the more remote letters of the alphabet, whilst between them and the footlights come the deadheads of ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... forgotten nothing! To attempt to instruct a Peer would be as gross an impertinence to the instinct of his order as to present MINERVA—who no doubt came from the head of JOVE a Peeress in her own right—with a toy alphabet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... of the World prays for a long time and afterwards approaches the coffin and stretches out his hand. The flames thereon burn brighter; the stripes of fire on the walls disappear and revive, interlace and form mysterious signs from the alphabet vatannan. From the coffin transparent bands of scarcely noticeable light begin to flow forth. These are the thoughts of his predecessor. Soon the King of the World stands surrounded by an auriole of this light and ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... before he fell sick and was sent away to the country where the merry haymakers were. Of course, there were worse names than Ben Holt. It was surely better than Eygji Watts, whose sanguine parents were said to have named him with the first five letters they drew from a hat containing the alphabet; Ben Holt was assuredly better than Eygji, even had this not been rendered into "Hedge-hog" by careless companions. His last confusion of ideas was a wondering if Bernal Linford was as good a name as Ben Holt, and why he could not remember having chosen ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet." ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... down through the alphabet," Polly advised him, rather proud to be able to answer him so promptly. "Bars, cars, fars, jars—that way, you know. How I found out is that Sister Winnie writes so ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... should again succumb to the demands of nature—or the influence of tobacco—how could he best make use of the opportunity? It was a puzzling question. To speak—in a whisper or otherwise—was not to be thought of. Detection would follow almost certainly. The dumb alphabet would have been splendid, though dangerous, but neither he nor Hester understood it. Signs might do. He would try signs, though he had never tried them before. What then? Did not "Never venture, never win," "Faint heart never won," etcetera, and a host of similar proverbs ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... which she found this little Alabama child possessed. The following year Miss Sullivan brought the child, then eight years old, to Boston, and Mrs. Keller came with her. They visited Miss Fuller's school. Miss Sullivan had taught the child the manual alphabet, and she had obtained much information by means of it. Miss Fuller noticed how quickly she appreciated the ideas given ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... dismay of the accomplished corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and "reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she, too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet; and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those who dare less. The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... The general use which may be made of the table is obvious—but, in this particular cipher, we shall only very partially require its aid. As our predominant character is 8, we will commence by assuming it as the e of the natural alphabet. To verify the supposition, let us observe if the 8 be seen often in couples—for e is doubled with great frequency in English—in such words, for example, as 'meet,' '.fleet,' 'speed,' 'seen,' been,' 'agree,' &c. In the present ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... title of a famous poem by Gordon, Kotzo shel Yod, literally "the tittle of the Yod" the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The poem in question pictures the tragedy of a woman who remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of a trifling error ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... the Phoenician alphabet, parent of all the European alphabets, was derived from an Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the Mayas ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... its thirteen cantos," leaving, therefore, the cabalistic numeber seven for the body of the poem. And all this regulation not being sufficiently meaningless, fantastic, and oppressive, he invents an elaborate system for compelling each of his sections and groups to begin with a letter of the alphabet, determined beforehand, the letters being selected so as to compose words having "a synthetic or sympathetic signification," and as close a relation as possible to the section or part to ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Gold byzants of the fifth century prove an intercourse with Constantinople at the exact date of the colonisation of Britain. From the very earliest moment when we catch a glimpse of its nature, the home-grown English culture had already begun to be modified by the superior arts of Rome. Even the alphabet was known and used in its Runic form, though the absence of writing materials caused its employment to be restricted to inscriptions on wooden tablets, on rude stone monuments, or on utensils of metal-work. A golden drinking-horn found in Sleswick, and ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add any further ceremonial, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... that the stems, isolated leaves, or small groups of leaves, form a letter of the alphabet, sometimes a number. These letters and numbers have meanings which must be looked for in connection with other noticeable signs. If an initial "M" appears, and near to it a small square or oblong leaf, both being near the rim of the cup, it would indicate a letter coming speedily ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... dreams Copernicus had kindled. Did this earth Move? Was the sun the centre of our scheme? And Tycho told him, there is but one way To know the truth, and that's to sweep aside All the dark cobwebs of old sophistry, And watch and learn that moving alphabet, Each smallest silver character inscribed Upon the skies themselves, noting them down, Till on a day we find them taking shape In phrases, with a meaning; and, at last, The hard-won beauty of that celestial book With all ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... before my eyes, (she had then given me no reason to fear,) I frankly asked her to teach me to read; and, without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters. My mistress seemed almost as proud of my progress, as if I had been her own child; and, supposing that her husband would be as well pleased, she made no secret ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... suitors learn I pray, Is not each time the clock strikes through the day, In Cupid's alphabet I think I've read, Old Time, by lovers, likes not to be led; And since so closely he pursues his plan, 'Tis right to seize him, often as you can. Delays are dangerous, in love or war, And Nicaise is a proof ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... "Set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry," &c., the word rendered "mark" is [Hebrew: TdageshW] (Tau), the name of the Hebrew letter answering to the above: and as the Samaritan alphabet, which the present Hebrew characters have superseded, was then in use, it is highly probable that the "mark" referred to in Ezekiel's vision was the Samaritan Tau, as seen on ancient Hebrew shekels, resembling a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... beginnings of what is called our Literature. Literature really means letters, for it comes from a Latin word littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet. Words are made by letters of the alphabet being set together, and our literature again by words being set ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Z—— (I must have a letter for my nameless town, and I have gone through the whole alphabet for it, and picked up a crooked stick at last), and the new group of people he had got among interested him. He liked problems and experiments. They were what he excelled in at the Military School. This was his first furlough; and it was since his entrance at ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... is delicious," he answered her, speaking more lightly than he felt. "What a numskull you make, Grizel, of any man who presumes to write about women! I am at school again, and you are Miss Ailie teaching me the alphabet. But I thought you lost that serious little girl on the doleful day when she heard you say that you ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... simplified spelling "seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system" overlooks the advantage that writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over writing with purely conventional characters, as in China. Now English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe. Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be making it more phonetic, and consequently easier. At present it is a mass of ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... times a young wolf was put to school, to endeavour, by instruction, to correct his natural propensity to voracity. His master, in order to teach him to read, transcribed, in large characters, some letters of the alphabet, and attempted to make him understand these signs. But instead of reading K L S, as it was written, the savage animal read fluently Kid, Lamb, Sheep. He was governed by instinct, and his nature was incorrigible. The son of a robber is in the very same situation: vice is coeval with his existence. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... estates (heavily encumbered before her father came to the rescue) were among the oldest and most coveted in the English market. Her mother noted, with unctuous joy, that the present Lady Bazelhurst in babyhood had extreme difficulty in mastering the eighth letter of the alphabet, certainly a most flattering sign of natal superiority, notwithstanding the fact that her father was plain old John Banks (deceased), formerly of Jersey City, more latterly of ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... detected in herself in relation to little Nicholas some symptoms of her father's irritability. However often she told herself that she must not get irritable when teaching her nephew, almost every time that, pointer in hand, she sat down to show him the French alphabet, she so longed to pour her own knowledge quickly and easily into the child—who was already afraid that Auntie might at any moment get angry—that at his slightest inattention she trembled, became flustered and heated, raised her voice, and sometimes ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... larger, better, nobler than the denizens of the plains. "Flee to the mountains," cried the angel to Lot. Ah! there was meaning in the command. Men stagnate upon the plain; they grow indolent, sensual, mediocre there, and are only vivified as they seek the great alphabet of nature, as they pulsate with her in her wondrous heart-beats. It has been the mountain men who have ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... again. "Come to order! We shall now review our semaphore alphabet. Lineup! Troop, attention! ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... ago we were quite sure that it was beyond the bounds of natural possibility to produce a bad burn upon the human body by touching the flesh with a bit of cardboard or a common lead pencil. Now we know with equal certainty that if upon one arm of a hypnotised patient we impress a letter of the alphabet cut out of wood, telling him that it is red-hot iron, the shape of the letter will on the following day be found on a raw and painful wound not only in the place we selected but on the other arm, in the exactly corresponding spot, and reversed as though seen in a looking-glass; ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... everybody intimately—by sight. She was squat, dyed, rouged and penciled, badly, too. She was written down in the city directory as Madame de Chevreuse, but she was emphatically not of French extraction. In her alphabet there were generally but twenty-five letters; there were frequent times when she had no idea that there existed such a letter as "g." How she came to appropriate so distinguished a name as De Chevreuse was a puzzle. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... America, or in any other kingdom in the world. The cathedral of Tours has nothing to distinguish it except its antiquity, two beautiful towers, and a library of most valuable manuscripts. Amongst these there is a copy of the Pentateuch, written in the alphabet of the country, upwards of eleven hundred years ago. There is likewise a copy of the four Evangelists, written in Saxon letters, in the beginning of the fifth century, about fifty years after Constantine declared Christianity to be the religion ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... the place of his mother, sent him to "Hammenotia School" in Oxford University, which he attended for four and a half years, received his diploma, and was transferred to Cambridge College. Here he attended for four years. At the former school he learned the alphabet, went up to the seventh grade, learned some medicine about herbs, etc. "I learned some medicine, not all of it. I didn't practice it much; just practiced it enough to do the country good. At that time we didn't have any ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... of the island whereon the treasure was said to have been secreted, as viewed from certain bearings—and I knew that these figures must stand in lieu of a certain arrangement of the letters of the alphabet, forming words. I had early noted the somewhat curious fact that there was but one solitary nought throughout the document; but that only helped me so far as to render me morally certain that the letters of the text ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... to revive the spirit of literature. His difficulties were great. It was not alone the resuscitating of a dead literary desire, but it entailed also the providing of a vehicle of expression, namely an alphabet, so deeply had the Persian domination imprinted itself upon the land. As might be expected, the primary results of the revival were didactic, speculative, or religious in character. Mysticism at that time flourished in the monasteries, and ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... were in a state of great ignorance, very few of the common people being able either to read or write; that with respect to schools, there was but one in the place, where four or five children were taught the alphabet, but that even this was at present closed; he informed me, however, that there was a school at Colhares, about a league distant. Amongst other things, he said that nothing more surprised him than ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of Malay words in the native character is hardly yet fixed, though the Perso-Arabic alphabet has been in use since the thirteenth century; and those follow but a vain shadow who seek to prescribe exact modes of spelling words regarding which even native authorities are not agreed, and of which the ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... opportunity of learning, he set himself to read with such close application that, from being comparatively thin, the effect of having been fond of the chase, he became quite corpulent from want of exercise. Mr. Oswell gave him his first lesson in figures, and he acquired the alphabet on the first day of my residence at Chonuane. He was by no means an ordinary specimen of the people, for I never went into the town but I was pressed to hear him read some chapters of the Bible. Isaiah was ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... intent, dogged persistence; the strong, firm chin set as though he were colt-breaking. Gradually, as I watched him that night, the truth dawned on me: the man was trying to teach himself to read. The "Cardinal's Snuff-box"! and the only clue to the mystery, a fair knowledge of the alphabet learned away in a childish past. In truth, it takes a deal to "beat the Scots," or, what is even better, to make them feel that they ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... vanisheth away!' What time have we for idle fooleries? Only time to learn the letters that we shall spell hereafter—to form the strokes and loops wherewith we shall write by and bye. Here we know but the alphabet of either faith ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... forgotten to bring a reading book, and now put Hephzibah through the alphabet, which she seemed to know perfectly, calling each letter by its right name. Daisy then asked if she could read words; and getting an assenting nod again, she tried her in that. But here Hephzibah's education was defective; she could read indeed, after a fashion; but it was a slow ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... bidder, annulled the wills made in favour of the bishoprics and abbeys, and sought to impose upon his subjects a rationalistic conception of the Trinity. He pretended to some literary culture, and was the author of some halting verse. He even added letters to the Latin alphabet, and wished to have the MSS. rewritten with the new characters. The wresting of Tours from Austrasia and the seizure of ecclesiastical property provoked the bitter hatred of Gregory of Tours, by whom Chilperic was stigmatized as the Nero ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... sentiments of your heart. As you have ever heard me, let your attention be tripled now. Read my letter once and again. Preserve it as a sacred deposit. Lay it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little skiff of your political system safe into the port of ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... hearing. Special institutions are in existence today which can take these deaf mutes when small and so teach them to make audible sounds that they can make themselves understood—at least partially. Lip reading is a wonderful improvement over the deaf and dumb alphabet, and ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... but eager listeners. Brother Fee said his object in requesting these specimens of the fugitives writing was to exhibit to those who were constantly asserting that negroes could not learn. He wished them to see the legible hand-writing of those who had only six weeks' training from their alphabet. ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... to the young man in his reading. 'Tis in vain to advise as to reading; a higher power controls the matter. Of course there are some books all must read, as every one learns the alphabet and spelling-book; but his use and combination of them he shall share with no one. Some spiritual power is ever drawing us towards what we love. Thus in books one constantly meets his own idea, his own feelings, even his most private ones, which he thought could not be known or appreciated beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... heart, suh," he gayly responded, "what's spellin', anyway? Just alphabet lettuhs fixed like some man chose to fix 'em befo' you an' me were bawn. An' so I say such a man's had his notions more'n long enough, and it's high time we-all took a whirl ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... laid out a plan for teaching others more ignorant than herself. She cut out of thin pieces of wood ten sets of large and small letters of the alphabet, and carried these with her when she went from house to house. When she came to Billy Wilson's she threw down the letters all in a heap, and Billy picked them out and ...
— Goody Two-Shoes • Unknown
... a fine departure for Cape Greenville, the next point ahead. I saw the ugly boulders under the sloop's keel as she flashed over them, and I made a mental note of it that the letter M, for which the reef was named, was the thirteenth one in our alphabet, and that thirteen, as noted years before, was still my lucky number. The natives of Cape Greenville are notoriously bad, and I was advised to give them the go-by. Accordingly, from M Reef I steered outside of the adjacent islands, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... convertible, the definitions which account for all—that which is always the same in all the difference, that which is always permanent in all the change; first it is the doctrine of 'those simple original forms, or differences of things, which like the alphabet are not many, the degrees and co-ordinations whereof make all this variety,' and then it is the doctrine of their combinations,—the combinations which nature has herself accomplished, those which the arts have accomplished, and those which are possible, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Might claim the breath I shape to prayer. I do not claim it! Let the earth Claim the thrones she brings to birth. Let the first shapers of our tongue Claim whate'er is said or sung, Till the doom repeal that debt And cancel the first alphabet. Yet when, like a god, you scaled The shining crags where my foot failed; When I saw my fruit of the vine Foam in the Olympian cup, Or in that broader chalice shine Blood-red, a sacramental drink, With stars for bubbles, lifted up, Through the universal night, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it is necessary to refer to them, astronomers have invented a system. To only the very brightest are proper names attached; others are noted according to the degree of their brightness, and called after the letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. Our own word 'alphabet' comes, you know, from the first two letters of this Greek series. As this particular star is the brightest in the constellation Centaurus, it is called ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... had pointed out its affected archaisms; to see (p.222) the name Ahura-Mazda rendered by "the mighty spirit;" to meet (p.258) with "sarvanman," the Sanskrit name for pronoun, translated by "name for everything, universal designation;" to hear the Phoenician alphabet still spoken of as the ultimate source of the world's alphabets, etc. Such mistakes, however, can be corrected, but what can never be corrected is the unfortunate tone which Professor Whitney has ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... telegraphic signal book provides certain words which can be signalled by a single number. Words not in this vocabulary must be spelled letter by letter,—each letter of the alphabet ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... The second letter of the alphabet. It is called a vocal labial consonant, which, no doubt, serves it ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, isn't it, as ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... freemen I conceive, should learn as much of these branches of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns the alphabet. In that country arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as a pleasure and amusement. They have to distribute apples and garlands, using the same number sometimes for a larger ...
— Laws • Plato
... tired enough to-night to fold my hands, and turn up my toes and say "Enough." If overcoming difficulties makes character, then I will have as many characters as the Chinese alphabet by the time I get through. The bothers meet me when the girl makes the fire in the morning and puts the ashes in the grate instead of the coal, and they keep right along with me all day until I go to bed at night and find the sheet under the ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... are always amongst the spectators persons in league with the prestidigitator. In the present case a woman is the assistant, with whom he has entered into an arrangement by which each card is represented by a letter of the alphabet; and the following are the cards selected for the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... (15th century), while the vulgar dialect has kept free from such admixture. Javanese influence is also traceable in the use of three varieties of speech, as in the Javanese language, according to the rank of the people addressed. The alphabet is with some modifications the same as the Javanese, but more complicated. The material universally used for writing on is the prepared leaf of the lontar palm. The sacred literature of the Balinese is written in the ancient Javanese or Kawi language, which appears to be better understood ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... and sang the night away. Robert Tomes echoed the strain in his tale of college life a little later, under stricter social and ecclesiastical conditions. There was a more serious vein also. In 1827 the Kappa Alpha Society was the first of the younger brood of the Greek alphabet—descendants of the Phi Beta Kappa of 1781—and in 1832 Father Eells, as he is affectionately called, founded Alpha Delta Phi, a brotherhood based upon other aims and sympathies than those of Mr. Philip Slingsby, but one which ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... accidentally opened, and a piece of paper was found, folded up carefully, upon which something was written in the Russian language, as was supposed. The date 1778 was prefixed to it, and, in the body of the written note, there was a reference to the year 1776. Not learned enough to decypher the alphabet of the writer, his numerals marked sufficiently that others had preceded us in visiting this dreary part of the globe, who were united to us by other ties besides those of our common nature; and the hopes of soon meeting with some of the Russian traders ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... bibles. One girl had a copy of the crown lands rules and regulations. Only six could read a sentence by spelling each word. They had to be started from the beginning, and Archie had provided for that by producing a smoothly planed board on which he had printed, with a carpenter's pencil, the alphabet on one side and figures on the other. The children, with a few exceptions, were eager to learn. Then he got them to memorize the second verse of the 23rd psalm, and taught them a simple hymn, singing both. They were strong on singing, and a boy volunteered to ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... pray!' she cried. The chief arose, and on opening his eyes beheld the same glaring lights and heard the same ominous sound. Impelled by the extreme urgency of the case, he commenced, with all possible vehemence, to vociferate the alphabet, as a prayer to God to deliver them from the vengeance of Satan! On hearing this, the cat, as much alarmed as themselves, fled precipitately away, leaving the chief and his wife congratulating themselves on the efficacy ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the spirits converse with this gentleman?' At all events, thought I, the term 'gentleman' applies to the next world, which is a comfort. She listened for the answer. Presently three distinct raps on the table signified assent. She then took from her reticule a card whereon were printed the alphabet, and numerals up to 10. The letters were separated by transverse lines. She gave me a pencil with these instructions: I was to think, not utter, my question, and then put the pencil on each of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... every other work held in little estimation and performed for hire—chiefly in the hands of slaves, freedmen, or foreigners, or in other words chiefly in the hands of Greeks or half-Greeks;(4) which was attended with the less difficulty, because the Latin alphabet was almost identical with the Greek and the two languages possessed a close and striking affinity. But this was the least part of the matter; the importance of the study of Greek in a formal point of view exercised a far deeper ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Josef were kept awake by the recruits, about 280 in number, singing the war- song of the Paupaus. This wild song consisted of a short air and chorus. The tone was, although wild, not inharmonious, and the words rather euphonious. As near as our alphabet can convey ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... least furnished her with the opportunity of studying the notebook she had found in the secret hiding place, and of making herself conversant with the gang's cipher; and she now set to work upon it. It was a numerical cipher. Each letter of the alphabet in regular rotation was represented by its corresponding numeral; a zero was employed to set off one letter from another, and the addition of the numerals between the zeros indicated the number of the letter involved. Also, there being but twenty-six letters in the alphabet, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... that he, too, was god of eloquence and poetry, and could win all hearts by means of his divine voice; he was like Mercury in that he taught mortals the use of runes, while the Greek god introduced the alphabet. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... strangers who came, grew intimate, and disappeared! The glances that followed Diane when she crossed a room! The shrug, the whisper, the suggestive grimace, at the mention of her name! All these were as an alphabet in which Mrs. Eveleth, grown skilful by long years of observation, read what had become not less familiar than ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... a plain errand of business. No need, as you hint, to mention names; and therefore let me present myself as Mr. Z. The residue of the alphabet is at your service ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... in Latin are distinguished from more recent ones in the same language by the forms of the letters, by the names which appear in them, and by archaisms in grammar and orthography. Inscriptions in the Greek tongue are rare, though the letters of the Greek alphabet, scratched on walls at a little height from the ground, and thus evidently the work of school-boys, show that Greek must have been extensively ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... give to your father, is part of his benefit bestowed upon you." So it is the benefit of my teacher that I have become proficient in liberal studies; yet we pass on from those who taught them to us, at any rate from those who taught us the alphabet; and although no one can learn anything without them, yet it does not follow that whatsoever success one subsequently obtains, one is still inferior to those teachers. There is a great difference between the beginning ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... they all rejected thee with disdain. (34) Then my children came to Sinai, they accepted thee, and they honored thee. And now, on the day of their distress, thou standest up against them?" Hearing this, the Torah stepped aside, and did not testify. "Let the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in which Torah is written come and testify against Israel," said God. They appeared without delay, and Alef, the first letter, was about to testify against Israel, when Abraham interrupted it with the words: "Thou chief of all letters, thou comest to testify against ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... a sure sign that they despise both their office and the souls of the people, yea, even God and His Word. They do not have to fall, they are already fallen all too horribly, they would need to become children, and begin to learn their alphabet, which they imagine that they have long since ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... him the little disc. Captain Hardy laid the disc beside the dollar on the table, and painstakingly examined again the marks on the coin. After a time he took a sheet of paper and across it in a row wrote down the letters of the alphabet. Then he picked up the message and made check marks below the letters in his alphabet as he found those letters in the message. When he had gone through the message, his paper ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... also Father Cyril himself. Each such witness appended to his signature a full list of his dignities and qualifications: one man in printed characters, another in a flowing hand, a third in topsy-turvy characters of a kind never before seen in the Russian alphabet, and so forth. Meanwhile our friend Ivan Antonovitch comported himself with not a little address; and after the indentures had been signed, docketed, and registered, Chichikov found himself called upon to pay only the merest trifle in the way of Government percentage and fees for publishing the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... discussed. Caves used in ancient times as habitations or sepulchres and old shrines occasionally offer evidence in the form of symbols which, since they bear some resemblance to the letters of the Korean alphabet (onmuri), have been imagined to be at once the origin of the latter and the script of the Kami-no-yo (Age of the Kami). But such fancies are no longer seriously entertained. It is agreed that the so-called "letters" are nothing more than copies of marks produced by the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... lowest species of literature—if it must be so designated—that we gather the real genius, or mental character of the ordinary classes of society. I do assure you that some of these chap publications are singularly droll and curious. Even the very rudiments of learning, or the mere alphabet-book, meets the eye in a very imposing ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... catalog, program. If the student employs these forms, he must use them consistently. Many writers oppose simplified spelling; many advocate it; many compromise. Others desire to supplant our present alphabet with one more nearly phonetic, and prefer, until this fundamental reform takes place, to preserve our present spelling ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... for their judgment as to the soundness of his views, a sermon, not yet preached, on the relation of baptized children to the church. We will call him, and two of the ministers who agreed with his views, by their initials, respectively, which consisted of the first three letters of the alphabet; while the three who dissented from them had, as initials to their names, letters remote from these. Neither Messrs. A., B., and C., nor Messrs. R., S., and T., had had any previous concert or comparison of views on this interesting subject; but they found themselves thus arrayed ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... of faith and conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity, writing, and the materials for writing, first came into the land, about the year 1000. There is no proof that the earlier or Runic alphabet, which existed in heathen times, was ever used for any other purposes than those of simple monumental inscriptions, or of short legends on weapons or sacrificial vessels, or horns and drinking cups. But with the Roman alphabet came not only a readier means of expressing thought, but ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... plaintive, with a barbaric twang like the plucked string of a Congo war-fiddle, the sound had fascinated him. It is made in the throat by processes utterly impossible to describe in human words, and no alphabet as yet produced by civilized man affords the symbols to vocalize it to the ear of imagination. "Gunk" is the poor makeshift that must be employed ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... papers, and on the ground was seated a venerable, white-bearded old man, something between Stephen's notions of an apostle and of a magician, though the latter idea predominated at sight of a long parchment scroll covered with characters such as belonged to no alphabet that he had ever dreamt of. What were they doing to his brother? He was absolutely in an enchanter's den. Was it a pixy at the door, guarding it? "Ambrose!" ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the alphabets of the various peoples, we shall find in them clear indications of the physical and social conditions under which they evolved. Thus the Hebrew alphabet carries with it unmistakable evidence of the nomadic and simple life of those "dwellers in tents." The forms of the letters are derived from the shapes of the constellations, of which twelve are zodiacal, six northern ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... which a full knowledge of each other's goodness and worth inspires; and it is not necessary for intimate friends to go every day through those civilities and attentions which they practise with strangers, any more than it is necessary, among literary people, to repeat the alphabet over every day ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
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