|
|
|
More "Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... point, perhaps, 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 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... out, I one day called on the day telegraph operator, Will Witmer, and while sitting in his office, asked him to explain the mysteries of telegraphy. He did so, and I then asked him to furnish me with the telegraph alphabet, which he did. I studied it that night, and the next day called at his office again, and began practicing making ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... i.e. judges. Talbs, i.e. record writers. Kadi is generally spelt by the Europeans of the south Cadi, because they have no K in their alphabet: the Arabs have no C; the letter is Kaf or K, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... she exclaimed, closing the book as an exclamation point; "but I won't bother you with what I have learned. Master McCosh knows the face of the sky as well as I know the alphabet. You should have heard him and seen him one night, pointing here and there and everywhere: That's Orion, that's Job's coffin, that's Cassiopeia! As fast as he could speak. That's the ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... what is this but symbolism? The archer 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 necessary to have recourse to symbols, for words ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... would form with them a new word which was to reveal the hidden meaning. Again, they would substitute for the letters composing words the numbers that these letters represent in the Hebrew numerical system and form the strangest combinations with them. In the Zohar, all the letters of the alphabet come before God, each one begging to be chosen as the creative element ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... then form the 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
... created during the twilight of the first Sabbath-eve. These were:—The well that followed Israel in the wilderness, the manna, the rainbow, the letters of the alphabet, the stylus, the tables of the law, the grave of Moses, the cave in which Moses and Elijah stood, the opening of the mouth of Balaam's ass, the opening of the earth to swallow the wicked (Korah and his clique). Rav Nechemiah said, in his father's ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... alphabet was never intended to represent the sound of words. It was in its origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... 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, for instance, the most imaginative piece ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... commencing the study of Greek, and 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
... nothing to add of A. B., nor of any of the rest of the alphabet; and my breakfast being ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Contempt has the property of descending, but stops far short of him. She would die before she would reach him: he dwells below her fall. I would hate him, if I did not despise him. It is not WHAT he is, but WHERE he is, that puts my thoughts into action. The alphabet which writes the name of Thersites, blackguard, squalidity, refuses her letters for him. That mind which thinks on what it cannot express, can scarcely think on him. An hyperbole for MEANNESS would be an ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... left an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and operations, which, aptly joined together, do make one word that doth express their natures. By these letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... 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 a great favorite with him; and he was wont to use the same phrase nearly which the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... of Mrs. Crabtree's on the large arm-chair, to look as like herself as possible, that you may be reminded how soon she will come back, and you must not behave like the mice when the cat is out. Good-bye! Say the alphabet backwards, and count your fingers for half an hour; but when Mrs. Crabtree appears again, pray do not jump out of ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... age of the machine, there are evident signs of wear, for some of the letters have lost their sharpness, and this is most evident in the case of those letters which are the most used—the 'e,' you will notice, for instance, is much worn; and 'e' occurs more frequently than any other letter of the alphabet. Hence the machine, if recently purchased, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... quite unprepared 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 ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... it is impossible to conceive of a time when men had no means of communication at all. And at last, after long ages, men evolved in sound the names of the things they knew and the forms of speech; ages later, the alphabet and the art of writing; ages later still, those wonderful instruments of extension for the written and spoken word: the telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press, the phonograph, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... secure in her kindness that he had the boldness to ask her to teach him. Following her natural impulse to do kindness to others, and without, for a moment, thinking of the danger, she at once consented. He quickly learned the alphabet and in a short time could spell words of three syllables. But alas, for his young ambition! When Mr. Auld discovered what his wife had done, he was both surprised and pained. He at once stopped the perilous practice, but it was too late. The ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... something more than a mere guess. 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,' ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the town of Templeton was startled by an incident, which had it come to the ears of our heroes, as they sat and groaned over their "Select Dialogues of the Dead," would have effectually driven every letter of the Greek alphabet out of their heads for the ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... on the track more closely. I examined ancient documents. I found traces of an ancient language and writings, different from anything else in the world. I managed to construct an alphabet and to read some of the documents. From them I learned that Pelone was a city situated in some fertile valley of the Andes. It had existed for thousands of years; it was the seat of learning and culture. Much light would be thrown on the lives of the people ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... well-watched household. Miss Lois's conscience would not allow her to employ half-breeds, who were sometimes endurable servants; duty required, she said, that she should have full-blooded natives. And she had them. She always began to teach them the alphabet within three days after their arrival, and the spectacle of a tearful, freshly-caught Indian girl, very wretched in her calico dress and white apron, worn out with the ways of the kettles and the brasses, dejected over the fish-balls, and appalled by the ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... art of writing. They had an alphabet of their own, which was at once simple and very scientific. There were no vowels, but only consonant sounds, the vowels being supplied in reading, just as if one should write the words fthr or dghtr, and read them father and daughter. Their letters were as follows: ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... dumb action, will I be as perfect As begging Hermits in their holy prayers. Thou shalt not sighe nor hold thy stumps to heauen, Nor winke, nor nod, nor kneele, nor make a signe; But I (of these) will wrest an Alphabet, And by still practice, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... inexorable laws which give the adept his seclusion. No voice penetrates to his inner hearing till it has become a divine voice, a voice which gives no utterance to the cries of self. Any lesser appeal would be as useless, as much a waste of energy and power, as for mere children who are learning their alphabet to be taught it by a professor of philology. Until a man has become, in heart and spirit, a disciple, he has no existence for those who are teachers of disciples. And he becomes this by one method only—the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... a strong conviction that the Runic alphabet and dialect were simply an invention to mystify poor human nature, I was delighted to find that my uncle knew as much about the matter as I did—which was nothing. At all events the tremulous motion of his fingers ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... of sounds, of dots and dashes marked on paper, of right-hand and left-hand deflections of a needle, of bells of different notes, or of other symbols by which a fixed combination is expressed for each character of the alphabet, for numerals, and for punctuation. While the code is designed for telegraphic uses it can be used not only for the conveyance of signals and messages by the electrical telegraphs, but also by any semaphoric or visual system, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... listening politely as in talking 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 companions are ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... of May we are a maiden castle no longer. Black coats and hats ring at the bell, and pass in and out of the different apartments. The hall table is sprinkled with letters, visiting-cards, and programmes which seem to have had the alphabet shaken out upon them, for they bear the names of professors, doctors, reverends, and very reverends, and fairly bristle with A.M.'s, M.A.'s, A.B.'s, D.D.'s, and LL.D.'s. The voice of family prayer is lifted up ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... born in 1805, was one of those impatient creatures who are eager to read books before learning the alphabet. In taking up painting, she wished to start in at once with canvas and brush, regardless of preliminary training. In her musical studies the same tendency showed itself, and immediately on beginning her work in composition with Fetis, she ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions, combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D, until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... knitting was done, with many intricate and elaborate stitches; those known as the "herring-bone" and "fox and geese" were great favorites. By the use of curious stitches initials could be knit into mittens; and it is said that one young New Hampshire girl, using fine flaxen yarn, knit the whole alphabet and a verse of poetry into a pair of mittens; which I think must have been long-armed mitts for ladies' wear, to have ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... B C's in the Hebrew language. Instead of A, he showed them how to make a mark like this: [Hebrew: a]. Instead of B, they learned to make this letter: [Hebrew: b]; and so on, through all the alphabet. Then when they knew their letters, they could learn to read. And every Jewish boy had first of all to read ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable MISE-EN-SCENE, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what is your name, and what your calling?" the youth was so entirely overwhelmed in the ocean of love and passion that he absolutely could not utter a word:—"Couldst thou in fact repeat the seven Saba, or whole Koran by heart, if distracted with love, thou wouldst forget the alphabet":—the princess continued: "Why do you not answer me? for I too am one of the sect of dervishes, nay, I am their most devoted slave." On the strength of this sympathizing encouragement of his beloved, the youth raised his head amidst the buffeting waves of tempestuous ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... made out of almost anything, in the hands of the ingenious person with an idea. Coins, matches, cards, counters, bits of wire or string, all come in useful. An immense number of puzzles have been made out of the letters of the alphabet, and from those nine little digits and cipher, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... we 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; ...
— Statesman • Plato
... of the alphabet—-a. The mouth is open and the sound may be prolonged indefinitely. It is a full, clear sound, an unobstructed vibration of the ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... nearly touched their heads. The small round table was produced; the saucer, with an arrow pencilled on its edge, was carefully placed upon the big sheet of paper which bore the letters of the alphabet and the words oui and non in the corners. The light behind them was half veiled by ivy; the rest of the old room lay in comparative darkness; through the half-opened door a lamp shone upon the oil-cloth in the hall, showing the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... plains, terming the lower portion the delta. The word originally came into use to describe that part of the alluvium accumulated by the Nile near its mouth, which forms a fertile territory shaped somewhat like the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Although the definition is good in the Egyptian instance, and has a certain use elsewhere, we best regard all the detritus in a river valley which is in the state of repose along the stream to its utmost branches as forming one great whole. ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... results exactly similar.' This belief, though 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
... country in the whole world where men and women are not now grieving for the death of General Booth. Among peoples of whom we have never heard, and in languages of which we do not know even the alphabet, this universal grief ascends to Heaven—perhaps the most universal grief ever known in ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... when 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
... placed under the tuition of a leading teacher called Knight, whose school-room was in the upper storey of a house in George Street. Here I learned to read with ease. But my primitive habit of spelling by ear, in accordance with the simple sound of the letters of the alphabet (phonetically, so to speak) brought me into collision with my teacher. I got many a cuff on the side of the head, and many a "palmy" on my hands with a thick strap of hard leather, which did not give me very inviting views as to the pleasures of learning. The ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... have of civilization, it is difficult to draw a fixed line between civilized and uncivilized peoples. Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, in his Ancient Society, asserts that civilization began with the phonetic alphabet, and that all human activity prior to this could be classified as savagery or barbarism. But there is a broader conception of civilization which recognizes all phases of human achievement, from the making of a stone ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway. Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity, worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... not long ago, in one of his charming essays, that almost persuade the reader, "Ought women to learn the alphabet?" and added, "Give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to the career," his physiology was not equal to his wit. Women will learn the alphabet at any rate; and man will be powerless to prevent them, ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... The alphabet of the organization is so short and simple, that I will risk fatiguing your attention by repeating it, according to the plan I have ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... about six ounces weight each, which form the spaces between the lines, I ordered 120 pounds weight of those at a rouble a pound, being barely enough for three sheets. I had now to teach the compositors the Mandchou alphabet, and to distinguish one character from another. This occupied a few days, at the end of which I gave them the commencement of St. Matthew's Gospel to copy. They no sooner saw the work they were called upon to perform than there were loud murmurs of dissatisfaction, and . . . [four Russian ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... He accordingly narrates the political history of the place; the manners and customs of its inhabitants; their religion, language, &c. A number of engravings illustrate the whole, and depict the dresses of the people, their houses, temples, and ceremonies. A "Formosan Alphabet" is also given, and the Lord's Prayer, Apostles' Creed, and Ten Commandments, are "translated" into this imaginary language. To keep up the imposition, he ate raw meat when dining with the Secretary to the Royal Society, and Formosa appeared in the maps as a real island, in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... them with the tongue, Miss Letty stole behind Ripton's chair, and 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... passage of 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 from the hearts of those who such a little while ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the city of London, he would not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate, he would not know that the nation was so great as it is. This would be so even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not read our alphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary education in that planet has gone to rather unsuspected lengths. But it is true that a great part of the distinctive quality which separates Paris from ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... English stands alone in the highest rank; but as a written language, in the way in which its alphabet is used, the English has but emerged ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... now," said 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 his own; circumstances have ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... your abilities," she explained, hurriedly. "I know all that you have done in London and in Edinburgh, and these German places. You can tack more than half the letters of the alphabet after your name if you choose to. But I don't quite see what you are doing in ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... to us all. I soon learned to like Aunt Martha better than 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 ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... are mechant! I can pronounce all the letters of the alphabet as clearly as you can. But tell me this you are very particular in making me be civil to Dr. Bretton, do you ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Apion, i. Sec. 8. Origen says that the Hebrews had twenty-two sacred books corresponding to the number of letters in their alphabet. Opera, ii. 528. It would appear from Jerome that they reckoned in the following manner: they considered the Twelve Minor Prophets only one book; First and Second Samuel, one book; First and Second Kings, one book; ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware—just as, FOR it, she's ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things. I'm perfectly willing to recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered and ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, is the only red man admitted to the nation's Hall of Fame in the Capitol at Washington. The Indian languages, more than fifty in number, are better appreciated and more studied to-day than ever before. Half our states have Indian names, ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... perhaps, in connection with another sentence, the accompanying sound is given, and in a short time the student says the word or sentence accompanying every sound, and thus he soon learns how to use these sounds, and how to vary and combine them, just as an alphabet or series of words would be used by ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... think it to look at them.' Oh dear me, he was so impolite; he wouldn't believe that Hilary was doing his duty by them, though I assured him that he read them all the 'Ancient Mariner' yesterday morning while they watched him dress, and that I was teaching them the alphabet whenever I had a spare minute. But nothing would satisfy him; and off the two eldest must go to the Catholic school next week to be destroyed by the fog and to pick up with all the ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... 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 ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... the suburb. Here Fanny, for a considerable time, justified the harshest assertions of her stupidity. She could not even keep her eyes two minutes together on the page from which she was to learn the mysteries of reading; months passed before she mastered the alphabet, and, a month after, she had again forgot it, and the labour was renewed. The only thing in which she showed ability, if so it might be called, was in the use of the needle. The sisters of the convent had ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... did not comprehend. But she gathered that a wrong of some kind was being done to her and (this was more important) to Clem, and she connected it with the loss of their liberty. Until this moment she had known no schooling. Her grandmother in stray hours had taught her the alphabet and some simple reading, and the rest of her knowledge she had picked up for herself. She well remembered the last of these stray hours. It fell on a midsummer evening, three years before, when she and Clem—then a child of four—had spent a long day riding to and fro in the hay ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... for? to humour the arrogance of the proud, to pamper the appetite of the full, to tighten the grip of the iron hand of power; and though it be sometimes for better ends, yet the soldier cannot choose what letters of the alphabet of obedience he will learn. Politics was the very shaking of the government sieve, where, if there were any solid result, it was accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub, a mere conglomeration ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cypher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds; and tried to teach me his method, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Ban) is considered by his countrymen the most extraordinary genius that the Highlands in modern times have produced. Without having learned a letter of any alphabet, he was enabled to pour forth melodies that charmed every ear to which they were intelligible. And he is understood to have had the published specimens of his poetry committed to writing by no mean judge ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the letters altogether and to learn to read by the looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he prevailed with ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... 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, with ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... thousands of obscure transverse streaks.[379] Of these he counted some 600, and carefully mapped 324, while a few of the most conspicuous he set up (if we may be permitted the expression) as landmarks, measuring their distances apart with a theodolite, and affixing to them the letters of the alphabet, by which they are still universally known. Nor did he stop here. The same system of examination applied to the rest of the heavenly bodies showed the mild effulgence of the moon and planets to be deficient in precisely ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... shop-window, or placarded on a wall, without their immediately recalling to our mind an indistinct and confused recollection of the time when we were first initiated in the mysteries of the alphabet. We almost fancy we see the pin's point following the letter, to impress its form more strongly on our bewildered imagination; and wince involuntarily, as we remember the hard knuckles with which the reverend old lady who instilled into our mind the first principles of education for ninepence ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the Alphabet of loue, To con my Cros-rowe ere I learn'd to spell; For I was apt, a scholler like to proue, Gaue mee sweet lookes when as I learned well. Vowes were my vowels, when I then begun At my first Lesson in thy sacred name: My consonants the next when I had done, Words consonant, and sounding to thy ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... are all sceptics in the sense of investigators. The most pretentious disciple of Spiritualism does not claim to have exhausted the subject. On the contrary, they all tell us we are now only learning the alphabet of the craft. Perhaps the recognised Spirit-faces may have landed us in words of one syllable, but scarcely more. However, the great advantage which Mrs. Holmes possessed in my eyes over all professors of the new art was that she did not object to sceptics. Accordingly to Quebec Street I went, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... wisest man, wide as may be his vision, the Chinese mind and character remain of a depth as infinite as is its possibility of expansion. The volume of Chinese nature is one of which as yet but the alphabet ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... family took up their quarters once more at Dereham. George was now six years old, acutely observant of the things that interested him, but reluctant to proceed with studies which, in his eyes, seemed to have nothing to recommend them. Books possessed no attraction for him, although he knew his alphabet and could even read imperfectly. The acquirement of book-learning he found a dull and dolorous business, to which he was driven only by the threats or entreaties of his parents, who showed some concern lest he ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... answer a summons before their tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the mother-tongue of my soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a system, that gives you the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet covering them all. I could silence them: may not a man silence his awe or his love, and take to finding reasons, which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found? Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness: ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of 'em who did not know a letter of the alphabet, whose naturally dull minds had become more stupified by habitual vice— those men, who wus her inferiors, and her servants in every thing else, wus each one of 'em her king here, and she his slave: and they compelled her to obey thier ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... world. The purpose of all the 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 are like our Father. Hope often ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... church porch I found a school of dirty ragged children reading the Psalms from the small English printed edition; not, however, learning to read by means of the alphabet or spelling, but learning to know the forms of words by rote; boys and girls together, all very slightly dressed, and one of the boys ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... dear, names like Wintztschitstopschinzoudhoff Are the only things now make an evening go smooth off: So, get me a Russian—till death I'm your debtor— If he brings the whole Alphabet, so much the better. And—Lord! if he would but, in character, sup Off his fish-oil and candles, he'd quite set ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... ring of the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... the two and the five when fixed numbers are to be thrown or hit. Why? Because you must turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I should choose the five. If Biberli did ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... early spring. The round-up was set for the 10th of June. The grass was well forward, while the cattle had changed their shaggy winter coats to glossy suits of summer silk. The brands were as readable as an alphabet. ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... appeared! Mrs. Peterkin had mistaken the alphabetical suggestion, and had grasped the idea that the whole alphabet must ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... and thought how changed he was since then! What a difference between the former discontented mutability of his nature, and the deep, unswerving calm of patience that characterized it now! Learning and scholarship? these were the mere child's alphabet of things,—and fame was a passing breath that ruffled for one brief moment the on-rushing flood of time—a bubble blown in the air to break into nothingness. Thus much wisdom he had acquired,—and what more? A ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Immersed in a subject with which they were all familiar, they were allusive, elliptic, and persistently technical. Many of the words I did catch were unknown to me. The rest were, for the most part, either letters of the alphabet or statistical figures, of depth, distance, and, once or twice, of time. The letters of the alphabet recurred often, and seemed, as far as I could make out, to represent the key to the cipher. The numbers clustering round them were mostly very ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... in! And how is this rich world thrown away upon us, because we live in it such a moment! What mortal work has ever been done since the world began! Because we have no time. No lesson is taught. We are snatched away from our study before we have learned the alphabet. As the world now exists, I confess it to you frankly, my dear pastor and instructor, it seems to me all a failure, because we ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laws of nature, and the more closely these laws are lived up to, so much nearer "ideal" will be the health and happiness of the individual. Hence the necessity that these same laws should be as familiar to the adult man and woman as the alphabet. Further, with our present knowledge of the certain suffering, disease, and death that are bred by ignorance of all these subjects, it is little less than criminal to allow girls to reach the age ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... better reading than Addison, I think. Also some of Sainte Beuve's better than either. A sentence in O'Dowd reminded me of your Distrust of Civil Service Examinations: 'You could not find a worse Pointer than the Poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the Alphabet.' And is not this pretty good of the World we live in? 'You ask me if I am going to "The Masquerade." I am at ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... a melody with a recurring accent at measured periods. In religion they insist upon immediate answers to the questions of creation and destiny. The alpha and omega of all things must be in the alphabet of their superstition. A religion that can not answer every question, and guess every conundrum, is in their estimation, worse than worthless. They desire a kind of theological dictionary—a religious ready reckoner, together with guide-boards at all crossings and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... fire, feebly glimmering in the bottom of his soul; and as the Squire hinted at a sly story of the parson and a pretty milkmaid, whom they once met on the banks of the Isis, the old gentleman made an "alphabet of faces," which, as far as I could decipher his physiognomy, I verily believe was indicative of laughter;—indeed, I have rarely met with an old gentleman who took absolutely offence at the imputed gallantries of ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... cricketers were at work bowling and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the carriage at the gate, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Madelinette's great fame had come to her, he had protested to himself that it was honour for honour; and every day he had laboured, sometimes how fantastically, how futilely! to dignify his position, to enhance his importance in her eyes. She had understood it all, had read him to the last letter in the alphabet of his mind and heart. She had realised the consternation of the people, and she knew that, for her sake, and because the Cure had commanded, all the obsolete claims he had made were responded to by the people. Certainly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... watching while his young master slept soundly by his side. But he did not try to cheat time by fancying that he was counting a flock of sheep that crowded through a narrow gate into a field, or by saying the alphabet backwards, or by repeating all the prayers he knew, which were many, for he was a religiously inclined person, nor did he laboriously reckon how many Apostolic florins there were in seventeen hundred and sixty-three and a half Venetian ducats. On the contrary, he concentrated ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... saw that he had unintentionally left the door of his room ajar. The parlor door, too, must be open partly, or he could not have heard so plainly. What was that she was playing? Ah! Mendelssohn. Those "Songs Without Words" were as familiar to him as the alphabet. Now it is Beethoven, that beautiful work, "The Moonlight Sonata," she was evidently trying to recall her favorites to mind, for of course she could not be playing by note. Then she strayed into a "valse" by Chopin, ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... to the gardens all enwrapped in mist I hurried, dreaming of the vanished days, And still behind me—hieroglyph obscure Of antique alphabet—the lonely Faun Held to his laughter, through the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Species of them, that flourished in the same early Ages of the World. The first I shall produce are the Lipogrammiatists [1] 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 Epick Poem on the Adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four and twenty Books, having entirely ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to irritate the fierce and sanguinary spirit of the Barbarians. The rude, imperfect idiom of soldiers and shepherds, so ill qualified to communicate any spiritual ideas, was improved and modulated by his genius: and Ulphilas, before he could frame his version, was obliged to compose a new alphabet of twenty-four letters; [741] four of which he invented, to express the peculiar sounds that were unknown to the Greek and Latin pronunciation. [75] But the prosperous state of the Gothic church was soon afflicted by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... words could possibly consist of four letters each; but they might be the initial letters of certain words, giving sufficient of the word to enable one to guess the rest. Now there are 26 letters in the alphabet. Taking A as being 1, B as 2, C as 3, and so on up to Z as 26, let us apply this ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... inexhaustible,—they stumbling on by themselves, or the blind leading the blind, with the same pathetic patience which they carry into everything. The chaplain is getting up a schoolhouse, where he will soon teach them as regularly as he can. But the alphabet must always be a very incidental business ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... war seemed very far away—so far, that I have covenanted with myself to learn the alphabet of music. Tom Bodkin had promised to present me with a musical instrument called a dulcimer—I persist in thinking that this is a species of guitar, although I am assured that it is a number of small ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... 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
... the infinite variety of things could be built up by their combinations. For this it was necessary to suppose that the atoms were not all alike, but belonged to a large number of different classes. From twenty-six letters of the alphabet we could make millions of different words. From forty or fifty different "elements" the chemist could construct the most varied objects in nature, from the frame of a man to a landscape. But improved methods of research led to the discovery of new elements, and at last ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... is lettered or numbered. Each letter or number is called the "sheet's signature." Printers usually leave out J W and V in lettering sheets. If there are more sections than there are letters in the alphabet, the printer doubles the letters, signing the sections A A, B B, and so on, after the single letters are exhausted. Some printers use an Arabic numeral before the section number to denote the second alphabet, as 2A, 2B, &c., and others ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... is not a common name, and I cannot speak to it at this moment. But if it is here, I'll wager I'll find it for you. D'you see, I have them here in alphabet order,' he continued, bustling with an important air to a cupboard in the wall, whence he produced a thick folio bound in roughened calf. 'Ay, here's Fishwick, in the burial book, do you see, volume two, page seventeen, anno domini 1750, seventeen years gone, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... it was called—the master kept Chad in and asked him his name; if he had ever been to school, and whether he knew his A B C's; and he showed no surprise when Chad, without shame, told him no. So the master got Melissa's spelling-book and pointed out the first seven letters of the alphabet, and made Chad repeat them three times—watching the boy's earnest, wrinkling brow closely and with growing interest. When school "took up" again, Chad was told to say them aloud in concert with the others—which he did, until he could repeat them ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... Ogham," so called because the letters resembled the branching of twigs from a stem. The Ogham alphabet was in use in Ireland in pre-Christian times, and many sepulchral inscriptions in ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... beech wood. But Buddha had learnt to write, as we find by a book translated into Chinese A.D. 76. In this book Buddha instructs his teacher; as in the "Gospel of the Infancy" Jesus explains to his teacher the meaning of the Hebrew alphabet. So Buddha tells his teacher the names of sixty-four alphabets. The first authentic inscription in India is of Buddhist origin, belonging to the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the children of Mr. Langton, "who," he said, "might be very good children, if they were let alone; but the father is never easy when he is not making them do something which they cannot do; they must repeat a fable, or a speech, or the Hebrew alphabet, and they might as well count twenty for what they know of the matter; however, the father says half, for he prompts every other word."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 73. See ante, p. 20, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. "A subject," said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her hand. He smiled and took it, and, as it lay in his, looked at it for a moment musingly. She drew it back slowly. He was then thinking that it was the most intelligent hand he had ever seen. . . . He determined to play a bold and surprising game. He had learned from her the alphabet of the fingers—that is, how to spell words. He knew little gesture-language. He, therefore, spelled slowly: "Hawley is angry, because you love Hilton." The statement was so matter-of-fact, so sudden, that the girl had no chance. She flushed and then paled. She shook her head ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... 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
... 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 well ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... what they taught there—the alphabet, counting, and the rudiments of Latin and Greek grammar. He had a perfect horror of lessons—of Greek above all. This schoolboy, who became, when his turn came, a master, objected to the methods of school. His mind, which grasped things instinctively at a single bound, could not stand ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... have gained him a diploma from any college in New England. In truth, I dreaded him.—When our children were old enough to claim his care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased at this learned man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to trust them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure. But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and point to nature in the vast and the minute—the sky, the sea, the green earth, the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of the mighty works and coextensive goodness ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... constellation are named after the letters of the Greek alphabet, the brightest being called Alpha, the next in brilliancy Beta, and so on, right through the Greek alphabet. For example, the seven stars in the Great Bear are known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Higginson asked, not long ago, in one of his charming essays, that almost persuade the reader, "Ought women to learn the alphabet?" and added, "Give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to the career," his physiology was not equal to his wit. Women will learn the alphabet at any rate; and man will be powerless to prevent them, should ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... going to do. You know I found that G was T, S was H, and V was E; well, I tried and tried, and I couldn't get any further. I wrote down the alphabet, and put V opposite E, and T opposite G, and S opposite H. I stared at it and stared at it, and all of a sudden—I don't know how I came to think of it—I noticed that E is the fifth letter from the beginning of the alphabet, and V is the fifth letter from the end. The same ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... by the strength of its riches alone. But though England does not send thither none but her best men, the best of her Commoners do find their way there. It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M.P. written after his name. No selection from the alphabet, no doctorship, no fellowship, be it of ever so learned or royal a society, no knightship,—not though it be of the Garter,—confers so fair an honour. Mr Bott was right when he declared that this country is governed from between the walls ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... a very agreeable family to board with; and soon after breakfast left our comfortless hotel near the water, for very pleasant apartments in F. street. [The streets that intersect the great avenues in Washington are distinguished by the letters of the alphabet.] ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... naturally those of the Greek alphabet, to which they were obliged, in order to represent certain sounds which do not occur in the Greek language,[4] to add a number of other signs borrowed from the Hebrew, the Armenian, and the Coptic. So closely, indeed, did this alphabet, called the Cyrillian, follow the Greek characters, that the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... and sing With drowsy head and folded wing Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet 5 Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say, To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild-wood I did lie, A child—with a most knowing ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Polyhistor account is in general to be preferred, Eusebius seems to have used a poor manuscript of that author. Furthermore, there is at least one case, that of the name of one of Sennacharib's sons, which can be secured only by assuming a mistake in the Armenian alphabet. ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... 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 only ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... love my love with an A, because he is amiable, and everyone follows in their turn by repeating the form and qualification, beginning with the same letter as Active, Artful, &c. Anyone using the word which has been used pays a forfeit. Then it goes round with the letter B and so on through the alphabet. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... tends to 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 minster-builders; their ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by pupils in our public schools. Mark Twain was amused by such definitions as: "Aborigines, system of mountains"; "Alias—a good man in the Bible"; "Ammonia—the food of the gods," and so on down the alphabet. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... French and Greek when he was ten year old, And knew the Spanish alphabet as soon as he was told. He never, never thought of play until his work was done, He labored hard from break of day until the set of sun. He never scraped his muddy shoes upon the parlor floor, And never answered, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... "What, her alphabet? Because in my eyes it is quite superfluous. A mad idea once occurred to me of picking some naked gypsy child out of the streets, with the intention of making a happy being therefrom. What is happiness in the world? Ease and ignorance. Had I a child of my own, I should ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... especial credit for watching while his young master slept soundly by his side. But he did not try to cheat time by fancying that he was counting a flock of sheep that crowded through a narrow gate into a field, or by saying the alphabet backwards, or by repeating all the prayers he knew, which were many, for he was a religiously inclined person, nor did he laboriously reckon how many Apostolic florins there were in seventeen hundred and sixty-three and a half Venetian ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... obviously had not acquainted himself with the rudiments of Greek grammar. And yet, before giving positive opinions about these high questions of Biology, people not only do not seem to think it necessary to be acquainted with the grammar of the subject, but they have not even mastered the alphabet. You find criticism and denunciation showered about by persons who not only have not attempted to go through the discipline necessary to enable them to be judges, but who have not even reached that stage of emergence from ignorance in which the knowledge that such a discipline ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... had foundered; and when they saw it careering in amongst 'em, they set up a shout that made the very fishes in the bay rest on their fins and wonder what it could mean, for they had never heard Russians before, and it seemed as if the alphabet had been shaken ten thousand times over from as many pepper-boxes, and rained down on the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... have been reciting the alphabet backwards so far as Ahab understood or cared what she said. He was fascinated by her resemblance to a pink and white marshmallow—rather over-powdered. But she was still fortifying herself from that little black box in the farthest corner in the bottom drawer of her dresser—and fortifying herself ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... only Old English poems whose author we know are four bearing the name of Cynewulf, Christ, Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles. In these he signs his name by means of runes inserted in the manuscript. These runes, which are at once letters of the alphabet and words, are made to fit into the context. They are [image: ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... making dots and dashes. Telegraph the word "cat," using the alphabet shown on the next page. Telegraph your own name; ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... "Bacchus, or Dionysius, after the conquest of India (I refer to the semi-historical and not to the mythological Bacchus) is supposed to have gone to other and unknown countries. I imagine that those unknown countries were America. Pan, who accompanied Bacchus on his journey, taught those new men the alphabet. All this is related to the tradition of the arrival of bearded men, strangely dressed, in the American countries.... These traditions exist in the South ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... destroyed. The discoverers of truth, the teachers of science, the makers of inventions, have passed to their last rewards, but their works have survived. The Phoenician galleys and the civilization which was born of their commerce have perished, but the alphabet which that people perfected remains. The shepherd kings of Israel, the temple and empire of Solomon, have gone the way of all the earth, but the Old Testament has been preserved for the inspiration of mankind. The ark of ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to tint the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as a b, a c, Fig. 3, and then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A, inclosed within the lines, being ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... noise that no animal but man can make. 2. The name of a letter of the Greek alphabet. 3. Part of a shoe. 4. A ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... argument is to be drawn from a consideration of the question of phonetic spelling. Occasionally we find persons urging that all spelling should be an exact reproduction of sound. Indeed, an improved alphabet has been designed to enable the idea to be carried out ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Gold and Green, he had made an all-round athletic record never before, or afterward, rivaled on the campus. At football, basketball, track, and baseball, he was a scintillating star, annexing enough letters to start an alphabet, had they been different ones. Quite naturally, when the Doctor, speaking anent the then infantile Thomas Haviland Hicks, Jr., said, "Mr. Hicks, it's a boy!"—the one-time Bannister athlete straightway ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... little book which he held in his hands, that humble book which alone was to be feared, which was the ever triumphant enemy that would surely overthrow the Church. Modest it was in its cheap "get up" as a school manual, but that did not matter: danger began with the very alphabet, increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those resumes of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index dared not attempt to suppress those humble volumes, those terrible soldiers ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a desire for mental improvement and religious life 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... movement of the child was distinctly felt, perfectly in unison with the sounds. When there were three sounds, three movements were felt, and so on, and when five sounds were heard, which is generally the call for the alphabet, she felt the five internal movements, and she would frequently, when we were mistaken in the latter, correct us from what the ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... Conrad seldom attempts to give us the complete 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
... 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
... for the use of Colored pupils was erected in Washington, D. C., by three Colored men, named George Bell, Nicholas Franklin, and Moses Liverpool. Not one of this trio of Negro educators knew a letter of the alphabet; but having lived as slaves in Virginia, they had learned to appreciate the opinion that learning was of great price. They secured a white teacher, named Lowe, and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... yet quite mastered the alphabet. His task was, of course, soon done, and he was permitted to betake himself to the nursery or elsewhere, with his mammy to take care of him; or if he chose to submit to the restraint of the school-room rather than leave mamma and the others, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... annalists had in their hands when they wrote their books, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in old Irish, sometimes in a strange medley of both languages. It is now known that St. Patrick brought to Ireland the Roman alphabet only, and that it was thenceforth used not merely for the ritual of the Church, and the dissemination of the Bible and of the works of the Holy Fathers, but likewise for the transcription, in these newly-consecrated symbols of thought, of the old manuscripts ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... 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 poor preacher again took to shoemaking for the village clowns and the shops in Kettering and Northampton. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... and that 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 a philosophical ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... of letters are not merely alphabet men, but bona fide characters of consideration upon the turf. I confess Lord Kennedy is a bit of a favourite of mine, ever since I saw him so good-natured at the pigeon-shooting matches at Battersea; and greatly rejoiced was I to find him unplucked at the more desperate wagerings of the North. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... hand-to-hand contests against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me, by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against the powers of darkness, with the stout arm of discipline and the light of the manual alphabet, was in ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... I one day called on the day telegraph operator, Will Witmer, and while sitting in his office, asked him to explain the mysteries of telegraphy. He did so, and I then asked him to furnish me with the telegraph alphabet, which he did. I studied it that night, and the next day called at his office again, and began practicing making the ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... declared his intention to become a circus-rider, and Talbot, who has not so soaring an ambition, has resolved to be a policeman, it is likely the world will hear of them before long. In the mean time, and with a view to the severe duties of the professions selected, they are learning the alphabet, Charley vaulting over the hard letters with an agility which promises well for his career as circus-rider, and Talbot collaring the slippery S's and pursuing the suspicious X Y Z's with the promptness and boldness of ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... all grades and varieties. There are those who recognize parents and familiar faces, and exhibit some evidence of affection for them, acquire a limited vocabulary, and then cease, no progress possible even with the alphabet. They attain the size and age of two or three years and there stop altogether, as if a permanent brake were applied to the wheels of their growth. Some higher types may even come to speak connected sentences, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Latin. I also understood there were good books of the same kind in French, and I learned French. This, my lord, is what I have done; and it seems to me that we may learn anything when we know the twenty-four letters of the alphabet." The Duke, pleased with this simple answer, drew Stone out of obscurity, and provided for him an employment which allowed of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... time, and taught 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 they used ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... before breakfast; answering the mournful salute of the gladiators with a grotesque Avete vos—"Be it well too with you," a response, parenthetically, which the gladiators construed as a pardon and refused to fight; dowering the alphabet with three new letters which lasted no longer than he did; asserting that he would give centennial games as often as he saw fit; an emperor whom no one obeyed, whose eunuchs ruled in his stead, whose lackeys dispensed exiles, death, consulates and crucifixions; whose valets insulted the senate, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... began to hear their alphabet. They knew it and they did not know it. What they knew was not very much. Ruster grew eager; he lifted the little boys up, each on one of his knees, and began to teach them. Liljekrona's wife went out and in and listened quite in amazement. It sounded like a game, ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... to skip the letters altogether and to learn to read by the looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he prevailed with the stubborn ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the storm had subsided Ashton, who had seen several thousand dollars go glimmering because his initial came at the beginning of the alphabet instead of at the close, in the hope of still getting into the bandwagon in time moved to make the election unanimous. His suggestion was rejected with hoots of derision, and Frome made the conventional speech of acceptance to a House ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... 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
... small thing to say of the missionaries of the American Board, that in less than forty years they have taught this whole people to read and to write, to cipher and to sew. They have given them an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary; preserved their language from extinction; given it a literature, and translated into it the Bible, and works of devotion, science, and entertainment, etc. They have established schools, reared up native teachers, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... To her consternation she 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 pulled him by the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... criteria, the English stands alone in the highest rank; but as a written language, in the way in which its alphabet is used, the English has but emerged from a ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... of the peculiar types used. The result was, a thick quarto volume, every page of which bristles with evidences of acute erudition, and the most accurate reasoning and discernment. It bears the title of "A Universal Alphabet, Grammar, and Language," and it has for a motto a text from the book of Zephaniah—"For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may call upon the name ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... from the table to receive her, and the countess took and held her hand, looking into the downcast face with the tender sympathy of the woman, who knows all that love means, for the girl who has only yet learned the first letters of its marvelous alphabet. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... A B C's in the Hebrew language. Instead of A, he showed them how to make a mark like this: [Hebrew: a]. Instead of B, they learned to make this letter: [Hebrew: b]; and so on, through all the alphabet. Then when they knew their letters, they could learn to read. And every Jewish boy had first of ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... The Esperanto 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 ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... 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 ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... 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 age of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the average speaker has of his language is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the same ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... didst not only feel but see the divine Ideal. Thine is the conscious monotheism of Jewry. Like thy own Moses, even on the mount of celestial converse, thou didst ask thy God to show now his face, and didst write his words, not in the alphabet of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... i.e., meadow of fern: and so on to the end of the chapter, in a strain which becomes highly comic. Another writer followed in his steps,—Don Juan de Erro y Aspiroz,—who surpassed him in absurdity; proving to his own satisfaction, not only that the Basque is ancient, but that its alphabet furnished one to the Greeks, and that the same nation instructed the Phoenicians in the use of money; added to which, they passed into Italy, and from them sprung the Romans—those conquerors ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... dolls in their brilliantly gay garments, tied up with their big sashes. They are sitting on the floor and laboriously making strokes with a paint-brush. That is to say, they are learning to write. The Chinese writing is not an alphabet like ours, but each complicated symbol stands for an idea, and there are thousands and thousands of them. It takes a child seven years even to learn fairly what will ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... work bowling and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and will be able to commit it about as readily? If I had children, I should rebel at their being taught even Bible verses by novices. Why, it isn't allowed in public schools. The days have gone by when anybody is supposed to be smart enough to teach children to drawl through the alphabet. We have the best of trained teachers even for that work, why should the Sunday-school not need them ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... time they exported their alphabet. The Phoenicians did not invent writing. The Egyptians knew how to write many centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet. But their alphabet was still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... in the Arabic character, with modifications to adapt that alphabet to their language, and, in consequence of the adoption of their religion from the same quarter, a great number of Arabic words are incorporated with the Malayan. The Portuguese too have furnished them with several terms, chiefly for such ideas ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Mr. Grant Allen, there is no excursus on the origin of Tree-worship, and therefore that, perhaps, through ignorance, I have omitted something. Sir Richard did write in the sixties and seventies on Tree-alphabets, the Ogham Runes and El Mushajjar, the Arabic Tree-alphabet,—and had theories and opinions as to its origin; but he did not, I know, connect them in any way, however remote, with Catullus. I therefore venture to think you will quite agree with me, that they have no business here, but should appear in connection ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... to the ruins of Palenque, on this our continent, there are pyramids larger than those of Sachara in Egypt, at Cholula, Otamba, Paxaca, Mitlan, Tlascola, and on the mountains of Tescoca, together with hieroglyphics, planispheres and zodiacs, a symbolic and Photenic alphabet; papyrus, metopes, triglyphs, and temples and buildings of immense grandeur; military roads, aqueducts, viaducts, posting stations and distances; bridges of great grandeur and massive character, all presenting the most positive evidences of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... those with dark hair enter it. Science alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human faces; she needs not to have old age bring her faces already furrowed. Nevertheless, if the desire possesses you of putting yourself under discipline at your age, and of deciphering the formidable alphabet of the sages, come to me; 'tis well, I will make the effort. I will not tell you, poor old man, to go and visit the sepulchral chambers of the pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... for "utilitarianism," encumbering him. Nor were some of the correspondents of this body much more solid in their speculations than themselves; one intelligent gentleman having suggested, as a means of conferring signal advantages on the cause, an alteration of the Greek alphabet. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with an ascending scale or Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimens of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... Baby-Land George Cooper The First Tooth William Brighty Rands Baby's Breakfast Emilie Poulsson The Moon Eliza Lee Follen Baby at Play Unknown The Difference Laura E. Richards Foot Soldiers John Banister Tabb Tom Thumb's Alphabet Unknown Grammar in Rhyme Unknown Days of the Month Unknown The Garden Year Sara Coleridge Riddles Unknown Proverbs Unknown Kind Hearts Unknown Weather Wisdom Unknown ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... desires may yield to the new propositions of action. This library may then become a garden where the hypnotized person picks flowers from the floor, and the wise man stands on one leg and repeats the alphabet, if the hypnotizer asks him to do so. Let us consider at first this extreme case. By a few manipulations I have brought a man into a deep hypnotic state. He is now unable to resist any suggestion, either suggestion of impulse ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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
... instance, at Vaison in the Vocontian canton an inscription written in the Celtic language with the ordinary Greek alphabet. It runs thus: —segouaros ouilloneos tooutious namausatis eiorou beileisamisosin nemeiton—. The last ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... somehow Mr. 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 ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... adept his seclusion. No voice penetrates to his inner hearing till it has become a divine voice, a voice which gives no utterance to the cries of self. Any lesser appeal would be as useless, as much a waste of energy and power, as for mere children who are learning their alphabet to be taught it by a professor of philology. Until a man has become, in heart and spirit, a disciple, he has no existence for those who are teachers of disciples. And he becomes this by one method only—the surrender ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... "{}" is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... she pored over her new treasures, until one day Miss Fletcher brought her a primer, and the seventeen-year-old girl grappled for the first time with the alphabet. After that she was loath to have the book out of her hand, going painfully and slowly over the lessons, mastering each ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... is called an inverted alphabet cipher," said he. "I'll try that. 'R' seems to be the oftenest used initial letter, with the exception of 'm.' Assuming 'r' to mean 'e', the most frequently used vowel, we transpose ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... 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 first time. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the search for the "forms" and properties of things. In this he is guided by the following metaphysical presupposition: Phenomena, however manifold they may be, are at bottom composed of a few elements, namely, permanent properties, the so-called "simple natures," which form, as it were, the alphabet of nature or the colors on her palette, by the combination of which she produces her varied pictures; e. g., the nature of heat and cold, of a red color, of gravity, and also of age, of death. Now the question to be investigated becomes, What, then, is heat, redness, etc.? The ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of the Flood and the fancy of the Four Ages has been attributed to Babylon by some writers. Ecstein claims Chaldean influence in Indic atomic philosophy, Indische Studien, ii. 369, which is doubtful; but the Indic alphabet probably derived thence, possibly from Greece. The conquests of Semiramis (Serimamis in the original) may have included a part of India, but only Brunnhofer finds trace of this in Vedic literature, and the character of his work ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... detected the 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
... say something cheerful as his brothers entered, there was no response, and they sat down on the opposite sides of the fire, forlorn and silent, till Richard, who was printing some letters on card-board to supply the gaps in Aubrey's ivory Alphabet, called Harry to help him; but Ethel, as she sat at work, could only look at Norman, and wish she could devise anything likely to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... horse, sir," expounded the captain; "a horse can be trained to add and put its name together out of an alphabet, but no horse could ever write a promissory note and figure the interest on it, sir. Take a dog. I've known dogs, sir, that could bring your mail from the post- office, but I never saw a dog stop on the way home, sir, to read ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... tone. "Is there not a telescope at Long's Peak? Doesn't it bring the Moon within a few miles of the Rocky Mountains, and enable us to see on her surface, objects as small as nine feet in diameter? Well! What's to prevent Barbican and his friends from constructing a gigantic alphabet? If they write words of even a few hundred yards and sentences a mile or two long, what is to prevent us from reading them? ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Waw, the first, twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth letters of the Arabic alphabet: No. 1 is the most simple ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... to these in succession, he repeated the sounds in order. I made out that the figures in question represented the sounds spoken into the instrument, and taking out my pencil, marked under each the equivalent character of the Roman alphabet, supplemented by some letters not admitted therein but borrowed from other Aryan tongues. My host looked on with some interest whilst I did this, and bent his head as if in approval. Here then was the alphabet of the Martial tongue—an alphabet not arbitrary, but actually produced by the vocal ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... answering needles. The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables. I express myself muddily, capite dolente. I have a dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... have ventured to deviate from the very inconvenient Scandinavian arrangement, which puts þ, æ, œ, right at the end of the alphabet. ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... to be the most difficult language to learn in our day; but the ancient cuneiform was certainly quite as complicated as Chinese. The cuneiform had no real alphabet, only 'signs.' There were five hundred simple signs, and nearly as many compound signs, so that the student had to begin with a thousand different signs to memorize. Yes, boys had their ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... in propounding chiefly the search of causes and productions of things concrete, which are infinite and transitory, and not of abstract natures, which are few and permanent. That these natures are as the alphabet or simple letters, whereof the variety of things consisteth; or as the colours mingled in the painter's shell, wherewith he is able to make infinite variety of faces or shapes. An enumeration of them according to popular note. ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... Simk, Ghafar, Zubn, Ikll, Kalb, Shaulah, Na'am, Baldah, Sa'ad al-Zbih, Sa'ad al-Bul'a, Sa'ad al-Su'd, Sa'ad al-Akhbiyah, Fargh the Former and Fargh the Latter; and Risha. They are disposed in the order of the letters of the Abjad-hawwaz or older alphabet,[FN420] according to their numerical power, and in them are secret virtues which none knoweth save Allah (extolled and exalted be He!) and the stablished in science. They are divided among the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, two Mansions and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... 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
... mankind in a boundless variety of characters as well as features, and has given Ciphers to make up numbers, and very often by such additions renders the few much more significant and conspicuous. The Church has its Ciphers—for a mitre looks as well on a round 0 as on any letter in the alphabet, 226and the expense to the nation is equally the same; consequently, John Bull ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... answered thus the aged man, "He's not in Nature's debt; His ears so tight are seal'd, he can- Not learn his alphabet." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... 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 its history ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... The Study of History 2. Prehistoric Peoples 3. Domestication of Animals and Plants 4. Writing and the Alphabet 5. Primitive Science and ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... prudent to side with the latter, and therefore, doubtless, considered it wise to suppress all evidence of Reuchlin's influence upon his beliefs. All the other editions of the Margarita in my possession are content with teaching, under the head of the Alphabet, that the Hebrew letters were invented by Adam. On Luther's view of the words "God said," see Farrar, Language and Languages. For a most valuable statement regarding the clashing opinions at the Reformation, see Max Muller, as above, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mentioned in the Judge's diary, it is perhaps to note the 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 the stern conditions imposed by Cotton and the Mathers, religion looms large ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... they correspond by signs; they have a simpler alphabet than that of the deaf and dumb, for each idea that they may require to express for ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... were known. The Phoenicians, far more enterprising than either, must have been fully acquainted with their means of written communication—and indeed we are assured that they were so. Now, if a Phoenician had imparted so much of the art to Greece as the knowledge of a written alphabet, is it probable that he would have suffered the communication to cease there! The Phoenicians were a commercial people—their colonies in Greece were for commercial purposes,—would they have wilfully and voluntarily neglected the most convenient mode of commercial correspondence?—importing ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In this churchyard is a tombstone on which is engraved only the letters of the alphabet and the simple numerals. The story goes, that he who lies below, an illiterate inhabitant of the village in the last century, whose name, I believe, is now forgotten, being very anxious that, after death, a tombstone ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... were some of the correspondents of this body much more solid in their speculations than themselves; one intelligent gentleman having suggested, as a means of conferring signal advantages on the cause, an alteration of the Greek alphabet. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... she say. "Each one contains one of the first seven letters of the English Alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, a letter for each girl. Miss Sterling, will you be kind enough to give them to the ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... 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
... this. One of the Scott girls wanted me to teach her Bengali. When taking her through the alphabet I expressed my pride that Bengali spelling has a conscience, and does not delight in overstepping rules at every step. I made clear to her how laughable would have been the waywardness of English spelling but for the tragic compulsion ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... go has been our motto. It is hoped the form is most convenient. All is arranged under one alphabet, with a complete index. The author has consulted many intelligent cultivators and writers, who, without exception, approve his plan. All agree in saying that it is designed to fill a place not occupied by any other single volume in the language. It is impossible, without ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... which I examined in the Gottingen Library, but whether belonging to the work or a MS. addition I cannot now call to mind. The fanciful and flowery form of its letters gives great scope to the imagination in assigning them their particular position in the alphabet, and the difficulty of reading them is enhanced by the doubts of German archaeologists whether they are initials or component parts of a sentence. Herr Joseph v. Hammer Purgstall, however, in his version RECORD DE SCI GNSI, or in full Recordamini de sancta Gnosi, deduces ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... the alphabet of his calling. He knew the value of effect. He threw himself at once into the orator's pose. His gown took sculptural lines; his arms were waved majestically, as arms that were conscious of having great sleeves to accentuate the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... some music a strange appeal beyond the reach of words. Those mysterious sharps and flats, and major and minor chords, are an alphabet that in some occult combinations forms another higher language than that of speech, a language which, as we listen, thrills us to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... strong resemblance to certain markings on the Breton rocks, and are thought to possess an alphabetic or magical significance. In Scotland spirals are commonly found on stones marked with ogham inscriptions, and it is remarkable that they should occur in New Caledonia in connexion with a dot 'alphabet.' The New Caledonian crosses, however, approximate more to the later crosses of Celtic art, while the spirals resemble those met with in the earlier examples of Celtic work. But the closest parallel to the New Caledonian stone-markings to be found in Scotland is supplied ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... moment, but did not understand in the least. All she said was, "what funny words you use!" She went back to her alphabet—A, house; B, cat. It came more ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unnecessary, nothing puzzling. Therefore, after a room has been once arranged, there must be no change in it. For new possessions there must be new rooms, and after twenty years' absence—coming back to the room in which one learned one's bird or beast alphabet, we should be able to show our children the old bird on the old perch in the accustomed corner. But—first of all, let the room be beautifully complete, i.e. complete ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... veracious reports respecting the latest hidden thoughts of "Badinguet," and vivid descriptions of the respective toilets of the Empress Eugenie, Baroness de B—-, Madame la Comtesse C—-, la belle Marquise d'E—-, and all the other fashionable letters of the alphabet—chronicling the very latest achievements in "Robes en train" and "Costumes a ravir" of the great artist Worth. Even the men folk of America—"shoddy" of course—dote on those accounts of European toilets, which we never see given in any of our papers, excepting ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... them in spite of the general report, that a dead kingfisher will not turn its breast to the wind. He convinced himself that if two magnetic needles were placed in the centre of rings marked with the alphabet (an odd anticipation of the electric telegraph, minus the wires), they would not point to the same letter by an occult sympathy. His arguments are often to the point, though overlaid with a strange accretion of the fabulous. In discussing the question of the blackness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... hours be subdivided, as ordinary hours, into minutes and seconds. Note.—As an alternative means of distinguishing the cosmic hours from the hours in local reckonings, they may be denoted by the letters of the alphabet, which, omitting I and V, are ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... influence of this development upon the lives of the people has been profound. Whether the influence has been wholly for good may not be so conclusively apparent. Lord Bacon has declared that, excepting only the alphabet and the art of printing, those inventions abridging distance are of the greatest service to mankind. If this be true, it may be said that the invention of telephony deserves high place among the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... if any of your correspondents could inform me (and that soon) whether there be published, in English, French, German, or Spanish (though it is most desired in English), a manual giving a standard alphabet for the various kinds of writing now in use, viz. English hand, engrossing, Italian, German text, &c., with directions for teaching the same; in fact, a sort of writing-master's key: and if so, what is its title, and where it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... I'm a married 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
... daring, or his profanity, and is admired and envied by his group. The same with the army; the same with the literary and journalistic craft; the publishing craft; the cod-fishery craft; Standard Oil; U. S. Steel; the class A hotel —and the rest of the alphabet in that line; the class A prize-fighter —and the rest of the alphabet in his line—clear down to the lowest and obscurest six-boy gang of little gamins, with its one boy that can thrash the rest, and to whom he is king of Samoa, bottom of the royal race, but looked up ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... get up and 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 of ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up: it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell[602] and I amused ourselves, some years ago, with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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, and could convict him most triumphantly of a barbarian ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... around the trees, they are to join hands and walk round, every child saying the multiplication table, until they have finished it; they then let go hands, and put them behind, and for variety's sake, sing the pence table, the alphabet, hymns, &c. &c.; thus the children are gradually improved and delighted, for they call it play, and it is of little consequence what they call it, so long as they are edified, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... so 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
... 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 tongue of sand ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... king in my own country, the Talking Cricket told me - because my feet burned - that the alphabet had been swallowed by the cat - that was hung to a tree by a dog - that was owned by the director ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... sorts of people in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... taught the Arab to sing rhymes." But the poems thus sung by camel-drivers are generally short and never reach epic might or length. None of those older poems now exist, and it was only when travellers applied the Syrian alphabet to the Arabic tongue in the sixth century that written records began to be kept of favorite compositions. Poets were then looked upon as wise men, or magicians, and called upon, like Balaam, in times of danger, to utter spells ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... form the 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
... (x. 10) describes Vetranio with more temper, and probably with more truth, than either of the two Victors. Vetranio was born of obscure parents in the wildest parts of Maesia; and so much had his education been neglected, that, after his elevation, he studied the alphabet.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... shipments without shifting, was of Scottish ancestry. Alexander Davidson (b. 1832) made many inventions in connection with the typewriter, one of the most important being the scale regarding the value of the letters of the alphabet. As an inventor he was of the front rank. Andrew Smith Hallidie (b. 1836), son of a native of Dunfermline, was the inventor of steel-wire rope making and also the inventor of the "Hallidie ropeway," which led up to the introduction of cable railroads. James ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... flashes of alert intelligence. For forty-two months that child was content to sit on his fanny and vegetate. Never crawled, never spoke, never played, seldom even focused his eyes. Then one day his mother sees him study some alphabet blocks with every appearance of curiosity. ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... Greek, and a Latin quotation—"Verum, quum latebris delituit diu, emergit"; and of Wolfius Cphalus, also of Strassburg; and here again we have the Mark environed by quotations in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In a few instances we have the unlucky letter of the Greek alphabet—theta—forming a Mark with considerable originality, as in that of Guillaume Morel, where this symbol of death is surrounded by two dragon serpents representing immortality. The theta was also employed by ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day—without an alphabet—separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... himself to the study of letters, [Greek: grammata mathein], fearing the danger of falling into had company at school, he seems to mean only Greek letters, then the language of all the learned; for he must have learned at home the Egyptian alphabet. In the same manner we are to understand Evagrius and others, who relate, that a certain philosopher expressing his surprise how St. Antony could employ his time, being deprived of the pleasure of reading, the saint told him that ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... wants me to help her! Just afternoons, you know; not evenings. She's going to have two or three girls to help her. Miss Frost asked Gladys to be with her. You see, it's this way. Haven't you heard about the Alphabet of Booths?" ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... 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 noodles. She has also produced ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages; that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Then, from his assortment of bottles, he began picking over his morning dosage. Vitamins, of course; got to keep plenty of vitamins in the system, or it goes all to pot on you. A, B1, B2, B12, C, ... and on down the alphabet and past it to A-G. All-purpose mineral capsules, presumably containing every element useful to the human body and possibly a couple that weren't. Two APC capsules. (Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. He liked the way those words sounded; very medicinal.) A milk-of-magnesia tablet, just ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... children seated themselves, Peregrine on one side, and Patience on the other, to study their lessons. They were given queer little books, called the New England Primer, in wooden covers, and having funny, tiny pictures for each letter of the alphabet, and beside each, a jingle. There were verses to be learned from the Bible, too. Patience held her primer up close to her nose and studied very diligently, but Peregrine's eyes wandered out of the window and toward the blue sky. He was thinking of a kite he planned to make ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... the five when fixed numbers are to be thrown or hit. Why? Because you must turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I should choose the five. If Biberli did not put things ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 well known, the hypothesis that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Buchanan, Wallace, Burns, Bruce; and Bruce was as jolly a first-mate as ever sailed under the cross-bones of the British flag. The crew was composed of four Newfoundland sailor men; and the cook, whose h'eighth letter of the h'alphabet smacked somewhat strongly of H'albion. As for the rest, there was Mrs. Captain Capstan, Captain and Mrs. Captain Capstan's baby; Picton and myself. It is cruel to speak of a baby, except in terms of endearment and affection, and therefore I could not but condemn Picton, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... gentleness with firmness; and if these had not been sufficient, she had reserves of character which would have given her the mastery over much less plastic material than these ignorant but eager young people. The work of instruction was simple enough, for most of the pupils began with the alphabet, which they acquired from Webster's blue-backed spelling-book, the palladium of Southern education at that epoch. The much abused carpet-baggers had put the spelling-book within reach of every child of school age in North Carolina,—a fact which is often overlooked when the ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... no idea of letters, no alphabet, nor is their language reducible to rules: 'tis by painting they preserve the memory of the only events which interest them, or that they think worth recording, the conquests gained over ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... heaven's alphabet Hath many a word of mystery; I read not all thy record yet, Though perseveringly I try; But teach me, Lord! and none shall be More prompt, more pleased to learn ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... derive a great deal of amusement from this simple pastime. At the top of a piece of paper write all the letters of the alphabet. Underneath, the child who has thought of a word or short sentence puts a dash down for every letter contained in the ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... the Eton Latin Grammar till we knew every word of it by heart, but we did scarcely any retranslation from English into Latin. Much of our time was wasted on the merest trifles, such as learning to write, for example, like copperplate, and, still more extraordinary, in copying the letters of the alphabet as they are ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... 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 ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. "A subject," said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, "may arrest for treason: the King cannot; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little damaged. This duty over, I met the escort sergeant no more, but was transferred to the care of a quaint old boy who made an astonishing display of learning. He had four or five Latin proverbs at his command. He knew the Greek alphabet, had picked up a bit of Hindostani on Indian service, and a little bit of French and Turkish in the Crimea. All these he aired upon me in a very natural manner, and I was much impressed with his erudition, until a grinning ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... than the insertion of these pieces of criticism in a respectable periodical. We are not insulted with opinions on music from persons ignorant of its notes; nor with treatises on philology by persons unacquainted with the alphabet; but here is page after page of criticism, which one may read from end to end, looking for something which the writer knows, and finding nothing. Not his own language, for he has to look in his dictionary, by his own confession, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... earning a living. If he was intended for anything, it was no doubt his father's wish that he should enter the Church; and he got such education as the poor Irish clergyman—who was not a very provident person—could afford. The child Goldsmith was first of all taught his alphabet at home, by a maid-servant, who was also a relation of the family; then, at the age of six, he was sent to that village school which, with its profound and learned master, he has made familiar to all of us; and after that he was sent further a-field for his learning, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... of a poetic connotation. This editor liked short, crisp sentences. He wanted his adjectives served hot. He despised poetic connotation. Being only an editor, his name was Brown. If he had been a writer, he would have had three names, beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... pronunciation of the Greek language which then prevailed; and in a short time, so Strype, in his Life of Sir T. Smith, tells us, his more correct way 'prevailed all the University over.' He also endeavoured to introduce a new English alphabet of twenty-nine letters, and to amend the spelling of the time, 'some of the syllables,' he considered, 'being stuffed with needless letters.' As early as 1531 he had become a Fellow of his college, and in 1534 he was chosen University Orator. In 1540 Smith paid a visit ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... two sacred names of God, Adonai and Elohim, which characterized Him as benevolent and as powerful. The face of each Cherub measured one span, and the wings extended each ten spans, making twenty-two spans in all, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. [333] It was "from between the two Cherubim" that God communed with Moses, for the Shekinah never wholly descended to earth any more than any mortal ever quite mounted into the heaven, even Moses and Elijah stood a slight distance from heaven; for, "The heaven, even the heavens, are the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... had developed a huge publishing establishment with one big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... quelque armoire Ce vieil alphabet tout jauni, Ma premiere lecon d'histoire, Mon premier ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... a tradition that Cadmus introduced into Greece the letters of the alphabet which were invented by the Phoenicians. This is alluded to by Byron, where, addressing the modern Greeks, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... clothes be washed every week? Name each of your Five Senses. 12. What can your skin tell you that your eyes and ears cannot? 13. Do you know of any trade or occupation in which it is necessary to train one's sense of touch? Tell about it. 14. What are the blind children in the picture doing? (Their alphabet does not look like yours, for the letters are represented by groups of raised dots or dashes or curves, which are more easily and quickly felt.) 15. What must you do besides washing and brushing to keep your skin in ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... thousand of a sword, at a time when this copious dictionary was intrusted to the memory of an illiterate people. The monuments of the Homerites were inscribed with an obsolete and mysterious character; but the Cufic letters, the groundwork of the present alphabet, were invented on the banks of the Euphrates; and the recent invention was taught at Mecca by a stranger who settled in that city after the birth of Mahomet. The arts of grammar, of metre, and of rhetoric, were unknown to the freeborn eloquence of the Arabians; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 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
... 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
... educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of four or five. During the following years he receives the necessary grounding to prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. At eleven, or thereabouts, he commences his school career. Throughout the whole of this period he is put through a course of study identical ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... which completed the alphabet (making seventeen of this part of the work) were delivered to the subscribers. As a precautionary measure, those for foreign countries were sent out first, then those for the provinces, and lastly those for Paris. The eleven volumes of plates were ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... claims to have 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 revealed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... that no grab of the enemy can dislodge it; getting down under kicks fast enough to take advantage of any fumble by the enemy in trying for a "fair catch;" getting a quick start the moment the ball was snapped back, and a dozen other elemental features that constitute the alphabet of the game. The boys had practiced these things a hundred times before, but they can never be done too often or too well; and to-day under the new stimulus they outdid themselves. Each tried to surpass his fellows and worked as he had never ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 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 ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... have that twist in my brain, which is the curse of my countrymen—a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before the alphabet. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... see no other way of accounting for such alleged variations of gender, and number, and case, than by forgery, when the very forger himself must have seen them? Or do they seriously prefer some letter of the Gaelic alphabet to a law of nature? Will they forego the facts of an epoch, for the orthography of a syllable? If so, then the friends of Ossian, who is one great mass of facts, must turn once more to the common sense of the public, and leave his etymological ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... European children so far as they have been tried, but they have not been put to abstract reasoning. Their perceptive powers are large, as they are much exercised in procuring food, etc. Anything requiring perception only is readily mastered, the alphabet will be known in a few lessons; figures are soon recognised, and the quantities they represent, but addition from figures alone always presents difficulties for a while, but in a little time, however, it ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... this was as familiar to him as the letters of the alphabet. While Jason Philip gaped at his lips in dumb inspiration, the Baron himself thought of things that had not the remotest ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... through an assorted collection of brain stufferies, get so many college degrees that his name looks like Halley's Comet with an alphabet tail, and then teach college students for forty years without even taking one of them apart to find out what he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right through. He thinks of a college student only as something to teach—whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... lecturing. The professorship was obscure; he said it was Athenian, and Bobus had no immediate means of finding out whether it were so or not, nor of analysing the alphabet of letters that followed his name upon the advertisement ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... large clear type, contains alphabet and edifying and entertaining stories for children. 12mo. Paper ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... they introduced were naturally those of the Greek alphabet, to which they were obliged, in order to represent certain sounds which do not occur in the Greek language,[4] to add a number of other signs borrowed from the Hebrew, the Armenian, and the Coptic. So closely, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... collecting and arranging the manuscripts which had survived the desolation inflicted upon his country by the arms of Assyria, at the same time substituting for the more ancient characters usually known as the Samaritan the Chaldean alphabet, to which his followers had now become accustomed. From these notices, however, which respect a later period, we return to the more primitive times immediately succeeding the ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... on a piece of paper that was slowly drawn under it by clockwork. Now if the man at one end of the line held his key down for only an instant, this impression would look like a dot. If he held it down longer, it would look like a short dash. Morse combined these dots and dashes into an alphabet. For instance, one dash meant the letter "t," and so on. For a time people only laughed at Morse. But at length Congress gave him enough money to build a line from Baltimore to Washington. It was opened in 1844, ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... cautiously through the brushwood and looked down. She shivered a little. From here they could see beneath the bows of the rocket-ship. And there was a name there, in the Cyrillic alphabet which was the official written language of the Com-Pubs. Here, on United Nations soil, it was insolent. It boasted that the red ship came, not from an alien planet, but from a nation more alien still to all the United Nations stood for. The ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... represents a letter, which is not very likely, as not all the words could possibly consist of four letters each; but they might be the initial letters of certain words, giving sufficient of the word to enable one to guess the rest. Now there are 26 letters in the alphabet. Taking A as being 1, B as 2, C as 3, and so on up to Z as 26, let us apply this ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, is the only red man admitted to the nation's Hall of Fame in the Capitol at Washington. The Indian languages, more than fifty in number, are better appreciated and more studied to-day than ever before. Half our states have Indian names, and more than that proportion of ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... human face a hieroglyph, which, to be sure, admits of being deciphered—nay, the whole alphabet of which we carry about with us. Indeed, the face of a man, as a rule, bespeaks more interesting matter than his tongue, for it is the compendium of all which he will ever say, as it is the register of all his thoughts and aspirations. Moreover, the tongue only speaks the ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in relation to Ireland, is one of the most atrocious known to the history of mankind. It is fraught with the blackest ingratitude, the vilest injustice, and the direst oppression. Notwithstanding that Ireland first gave her an alphabet, and taught her how to spell her name—notwithstanding that Irish missionaries had nurtured her early educational institutions and reclaimed her from Paganism, she misrepresented their religion and their learning in high places, stole ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... finger to the pocket of Richling's coat, where the subscription-list had disappeared,—"this sort of work—whether you distinctly propose to be a philanthropist or not—is right, of course. It's good. But it's the mere alphabet of beneficence. Richling, whenever philanthropy takes the guise of philanthropy, look out. Confine your philanthropy—you can't do it entirely, but as much as you can—confine your philanthropy to the motive. It's the temptation ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... painted terra-cotta. They have swings, and ride on sticks and build houses. When bigger, the boy has his tops and hoops, with or without bells, and he plays marbles with nuts. Meanwhile attempts are made, somewhat after the kindergarten pattern, to teach them their alphabet by means of letters shaped in wood or ivory. Whether or not it is modern kindergarten method to tempt children to learn by offers of sugar-plums, that course was often adopted in the world of both Greece ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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
... section of a printed book is lettered or numbered. Each letter or number is called the "sheet's signature." Printers usually leave out J W and V in lettering sheets. If there are more sections than there are letters in the alphabet, the printer doubles the letters, signing the sections A A, B B, and so on, after the single letters are exhausted. Some printers use an Arabic numeral before the section number to denote the second alphabet, ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... the cuneiform alphabet, by which pictures have been reduced to phonetic signs, the attempt has been made to arrange or classify these gods according to their proper order in the Pantheon, but thus far much obscurity and doubt seem ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... A, B, C, As bees where flowers are set: Would'st thou a skilful teacher be?— Learn, then, this alphabet. ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... books on the woman question and gave 1,000 books about women to the Boston Public Library. The founder of Smith College said she was led to leave her fortune for that purpose by reading his article, Ought Women Learn the Alphabet? ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... against Apion, i. Sec. 8. Origen says that the Hebrews had twenty-two sacred books corresponding to the number of letters in their alphabet. Opera, ii. 528. It would appear from Jerome that they reckoned in the following manner: they considered the Twelve Minor Prophets only one book; First and Second Samuel, one book; First and Second Kings, one book; First ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... exclaimed Cordelia, in sign language on her fingers. Etiquette forbade her to employ her tongue in the expression of her gratitude, seeing that the girls had placed a ban on it. A curious contortion of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet was used among the Indian girls when pride forbade the use ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... "Bibliographia Eruditorum Critico-Curiosa," 1689, 1701, 4 vols., 12mo., being an alphabetical account of writers—extracts from whom are in the public literary Journals of Europe from 1665 to 1700—with the title of their works—is Beughem's best production, and if each volume had not had a separate alphabet, and contained additions upon additions, the work would have proved highly useful. His "Gallia Euridita," Amst., 1683, 12mo., is miserably perplexing. In addition to Marchand, consult the Polyhist. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... took turns reading the news, while the ranger's expression of amazement and admiration grew deeper and deeper, and his liking and respect for his young subordinate increased rapidly. Finally the ranger was given his first lesson in radio-telegraphy. While Lew was writing down for him the wireless alphabet, Charley was showing him how to make the letters on the spark-gap. Before they turned in for the night, the ranger had learned to distinguish the difference between the sound of a dot and of a dash as the signals buzzed ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... language; and being always keenly on the alert, we made extraordinary progress in attempting bits of conversation and in reducing their speech for the first time to a written form—for the New Hebrideans had no literature, and not even the rudiments of an alphabet. I used to hire some of the more intelligent lads and men to sit and talk with us, and answer our questions about names and sounds; but they so often deceived us, and we, doubtless, misunderstood them so often, that this course ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... 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 will admit is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Aristoxenus. The fourth book, in eighteen chapters, is entirely relative to the practice of the art, particularly to the notation. It is in this book that Boethius makes known the Latin notation of the first fifteen letters of the alphabet without preparation, without the slightest explanation, and as if he had done something which any one concerned with music at Rome would readily understand, as a matter of course. There is not one word to show that ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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
... print and pictures were intended for. The scholars came out at recess, and my mistresses gave me such instructions as they were able, which gave me a start ahead that enabled me to memorize the first six letters of the alphabet by the time ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... waiting for him in the parlour, and they went a long walk up the avenues and across half the alphabet in the streets, and through the pretty squares and circles, where the statues were sometimes beautiful and always picturesque; and the sparrows made a vernal chirping in the naked trees and on the green grass. In two or three they sat down ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... principle we have many apt illustrations in ordinary life, among which the various groupings of the ten numeral figures into sums of any amount, and the forming of so many thousands of words by a different arrangement of the letters of the alphabet, are familiar examples. When a child knows the ten numerals, he requires no more teaching to ascertain the precise amount of any one number among all the millions which these figures can represent. The value of such an acquirement can only be appreciated by considering the labour it would cost a ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... priests, in spite of the intolerant law and with the connivance of the local authorities, also a few scattered nuns, teach in a contraband fashion a few small groups of Catholic children; five or six little girls around a disguised Ursuline nun spell out the alphabet in a back room;[3165] a priest without tonsure or cassock secretly receives in the evening two or three youths whom he makes translate the De Viris.—During the intervals, indeed, of the Reign of Terror, before the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the simpler alphabet of the business, continued to occupy him. He consulted both Neergard and Gerald as usual; they often consulted him or pretended to do so. Land was bought and sold and resold, new projects discussed, new properties appraised, new mortgage loans negotiated; ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... never translate the Koran, they neglect the best means of influencing the Africans, who invariably wish to understand what they are about. When we were teaching adults the alphabet, they felt it a hard task. "Give me medicine, I shall drink it to make me understand it," was their earnest entreaty. When they have advanced so far as to form clear conceptions of Old Testament and Gospel histories, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... education, a time scarcely sufficient to give them a relish for learning, and far inadequate to wide and profound researches. As soon as a young man has closed this period of study, and while he is at the beginning of the alphabet of science, he must betake himself to a profession, he must hurry through a few books,—which, by the way, are rarely original works, but compilations and abridgments,—and then must enter upon practice, and ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... book. It will then be well to clear the board of all but a single Piece, and practise with that until perfect in its movements; another, and then another, may be added, until the action of every one is as familiar as the alphabet. ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... the Kami, letters of some kind must have been in use. Since then the matter has been much 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... which from time to time had come to this woman during her seventeen years' occupancy of the chair in which she sat. Upon the flyleaf was inscribed "Aphorisms: by Eugenie Ram." It was her intent to publish this darling work when beneath each letter of the alphabet twelve aphorisms ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... 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 is ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... 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
... everlasting trouble for me at home if my name was flourishin' in the papers gettin' an A.B.C. or D.A.M.N. or whatever the fixin' is. And I'd sooner have this"—slapping the German helmet that dangled at his belt—"than your whole darn alphabet o' initials. Don't forget what I told you about the dad an' those Schwartzeheimer friends o' his, the cousins o' which same friends I've been blowin' off the earth with bomb base-balls. Let it go at that, and never forget ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... brute could do it. How marvellous, then this adaptation! How wondrous the adaptation of everything, and how astonishing that any man, with all these things in view, can for one moment forbear to admit a God. Let him try a chance experiment. Let him take the letters of the alphabet and throw them about promiscuously and then see how long ere they would move of their own accord and arrange themselves into words and sentences. He may avail himself of the whole benefit of his scheme; he may have the advantage ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... probable that the various Berber dialects are the fragments of the language of those formidable, but doubtful, auxiliaries, which so often balanced and changed the fortune of Roman and Carthaginian arms. Of all these Numidian dialects, only one people has amongst them a native alphabet, the rest using Arabic characters: this people are the Touaricks. It is besides worthy of remark, that amongst all the African tribes of Central Africa, nay, every part of Africa, excepting the Coptic and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the brain-power alike of Indian and Eskimo; and no wonder, for it was a wooden leg, discovered by Anteek in what must have been the doctor's cabin—or a cabin which had been used for doctor's stuff and material. Like letters of the alphabet given in confusion for the purpose of being formed into words, this leg puzzled investigators because of their inevitable tendency to lead off on a wrong scent by assuming that the leg part was ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... stuff," he explains, "for in looking for the particular word or point that I want, I go over so 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
... flatly, declaring that it might have been written with her alphabet of ciphers, but was certainly none of hers. "There may have been designs against the Queen and for procuring my liberty," she said, "but I, shut up in close prison, was not aware of them, and how can I be made to answer for them? Only lately did I receive a letter asking ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pronoun. The relationship between the picture and the idea for which it is used is in this case through the sound of the name of the object depicted. That the early alphabets are of this type of rebus pictures appears in their names. The first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, are named, respectively, aleph which means ox, beth which means house, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
