ink of Christ's
words, _"Go tell quickly."_

"ARABIA THE LOVED."

There's a land since long neglected,
There's a people still rejected,
But of truth and grace elected,
In His love for them.

Softer than their night wind's fleeting,
Richer than their starry tenting,
Stronger than their sands protecting,
Is His love for them.

To the host of Islam's leading,
To the slave in bondage bleeding,
To the desert dweller pleading,
Bring His love to them.

Through the promise on God's pages,
Through His work in history's stages,
Through the cross that crowns the ages,
Show His love to them.

With the prayer that still availeth
With the power that prevaileth,
With the love that never faileth,
Tell His love to them.

Till the desert's sons now aliens,
Till its tribes and their dominions,
Till Arabia's raptured millions,
Praise His love of them.

--J.G.L.

XI

PICTURES WITH WORDS ONLY

You already know many curious facts about the people of Topsy-turvy Land.
Would you like to hear something about their language and their writing?
The language of this land is very old, almost as old as its camels or its
desert sands. The Moslems even go so far as to say that Adam and Eve spoke
Arabic in Paradise and they say it is called the language of the angels.
It is written from right to left just in the opposite way of this page of
English writing. The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight letters, all of
which are considered consonants. There are marks put above and below the
line to show the sounds of the vowels; just as we wrote the word _potato_
in our first chapter.

Arabic grammar is much more difficult than English grammar, and even the
boys who attend the big Arabic college of El Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, must
find its study a bugbear. Just think of learning _fifteen_ conjugations
instead of the much smaller number in Latin or Greek! The books used in
Moslem schools would look very crude and dull to you who learnt your A, B,
C, from an illustrated primer perhaps with coloured pictures.

Strict Mohammedans do not allow their boys and girls to have pictures in
their books, because they say all pictures are idols. And yet the love for
beauty and the desire for ornament on the written or printed page was so
strong with the Arabs that they began from the earliest times to use
their alphabet