arrassment of riches." This
is the greatest disappointment I experience with my "snippers." For,
occasionally, a book has too many good things in it to be easily copied,
and then my only relief is to own it and, marking it vol. _X_, add it to
my row of extract-books.

[Illustration: THE END]

WONDERS OF THE ALPHABET.

BY HENRY ECKFORD.

THIRD PAPER.

Perhaps you have never given a thought to the fact that, because you
were born into a nation using an alphabet that came down from the
Phoenicians, you are saved a world of trouble. But consider the Chinese.
If a Chinese boy and an American boy begin to learn their letters at the
same time, each studying his own writing, then by the time the American
is ten years old he has advanced as far in the use of letters as the
Chinese boy will have advanced in the use of his when he is twenty years
old. That is the same as saying that Chinese writing is three or four
times as hard to learn as English. Think of spending the years between
ten and twenty in learning to read! On the other hand, the long
apprenticeship of Chinese and Japanese boys to their letters does them
good in one way. They paint their letters with a brush on soft paper. By
this means they learn very early to be skillful with the brush, which is
one reason why Chinese and Japanese artists are so very dexterous with
their brushes.

All writing, let it be remembered, must have begun with pictures. It is
largely Chinese writing which has explained how all sorts of letters
were gradually changed from pictures to an alphabet, in which hardly a
single letter tells from what picture it started. The Japanese tongue is
quite different from the Chinese. But the use by the Japanese of signs
employed ages before by the Chinese explains another step in the
progress of language. The writing of the Mexican Indians also helps us
to understand the growth of alphabets. When, ages ago, the Chinese began
to write, they drew little pictures of the things they wished to
represent, as did the Egyptians before them in their picture-writing;
and from picture-writing they made some advance in the direction of
sound-writing, or rebuses. Then the little rebus-pictures were so much
altered that it became very difficult to see what they once meant.

Now Chinese is a queer language. All its words are only one syllable
long. But the sounds in the Chinese language are not very many, some
four hundred and sixty-five at most, and the