mily secrets; to the life of the street and the mart,
not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper
is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and
byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls--sordid,
ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if
there were real news to serve up.

Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from
between flaming advertisements of the shopmen's goods, like men on the
street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and
making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.[6]

[Footnote 6: This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of
Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded
the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He
lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate
news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work
done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War.
Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to
the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote
him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while
they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put
words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued
the high-class newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged
sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for
the sensational.--C. B.]

THE ALPHABET

Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it
means to have an alphabet--the combination of a few straight lines and
curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to
arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the
libraries in the world. An assortment and arrangement of black lines
on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are
not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them
is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race
since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been
invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric
races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only
picture language.

The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a
phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than
forty thou