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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
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