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More "Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... did not. It seems probable that writing was not in general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me, certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of writing. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... accepted thee, and they honored thee. And now, on the day of their distress, thou standest up against them?" Hearing this, the Torah stepped aside, and did not testify. "Let the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in which Torah is written come and testify against Israel," said God. They appeared without delay, and Alef, the first letter, was about to testify against Israel, when Abraham interrupted it with ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... silently this time. He had the sudden feeling that Dr. O'Connor's flow of words had broken itself up into a vast sea of alphabet soup, and that he, Malone, was ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... "There is nothing wrong with Joshua. He is practising signalling, that's all. Whyn is helping him from her window. He has to teach the scouts this afternoon, and is brushing up a little. You see, every time he moves his arms he makes a letter. The alphabet is divided into groups, and at the end of each group he stops swinging his arms, and clasps his hands before him before making the next group. That is what Joshua must have been doing which frightened ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... diminished amount of pollen is correlated with direct transportation by insects. Even in so simple a case as this it is not easy to see how this difference in the conveyance would reduce the quantity of pollen produced. It is, we know, in the very alphabet of Darwinism that if a male willow-tree should produce a smaller amount of pollen, and if this pollen communicated to the offspring of the female flowers it fertilized a similar tendency (as it might), this male progeny would ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against the instinctive fear he caused her; she looked at the sugar and turned away her head alternately, precisely like a dog whose master forbids him to touch his food until he has said a letter of the alphabet which he slowly repeats. At last the animal desire triumphed over fear. Stephanie darted to Philippe, cautiously putting out her little brown hand to seize the prize, touched the fingers of her poor lover as she snatched the ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... 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
... you have nothing else to do, you can invent some characters to represent our consonants, and with the aid of dots and crosses, write a letter to yourself, and see how you would get along if you were forced to use that kind of alphabet at school. The natives use the Spanish alphabet to-day, which is much like our own. Their language, being full of particles, sounds very funny when they talk. All you would understand would be ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... may illustrate my meaning by the letters of the alphabet, Protarchus, which you were made to ...
— Philebus • Plato
... say, "there's another day to-morrow," but that never helped even a Purple Dragoon to worry through to-day any the quicker. Poor, brave, noble, drawling, manly, pipe-smoking fellows! On this particular occasion FOOTLES uttered only one word. It was short, and began with the fourth letter of the alphabet. But he may be pardoned, for some of the glowing embers from his magnificent briar-wood pipe had dropped on to his regulation overalls. The result was painful—to FOOTLES. All the others laughed as well as they could, with clays, meerschaums, briars, and asbestos pipes in their mouths. And through ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... pain to see with what personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto "Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an opinion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... marriage, with no more attempt to analyze the meaning of the term "contract" in this connection than the Protestant Reformers made, but it can scarcely be said that these writers have yet reached the alphabet of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... dog! if he will sacrifice to Cybele or Isis, he will be pardoned—if not, the tiger has him. At least, so I suppose; but the trial will decide. We talk while the urn's still empty. And the Greek may yet escape the deadly Theta of his own alphabet. But enough of this gloomy subject. How ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... sixth edition of 1562 no further addition to the plates is known. They were cut with a knife upon wood, and not with the ordinary graver, in 1527, or a little earlier, by Hans of Luxemburg, sometimes called Franck, whose full signature is on Holbein's Alphabet in the British Museum, which contains several sets of the impressions, believed to be engraver's proofs from the original blocks, such as exist also in Berlin, at Basle, in Paris, and at Carlsruhe. They have been frequently copied, but the best modern imitations ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... lightly (though, for me, Why truth may not be gay, I cannot see: Just as, we know, judicious teachers coax With sugar-plum or cake their little folks To learn their alphabet):—still, we will try A graver tone, and lay our joking by. The man that with his plough subdues the land, The soldier stout, the vintner sly and bland, The venturous sons of ocean, all declare ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... 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 ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... from 7000 to 10,000. There will really be a clearance in a year or two if 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, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... communicated with me, it is true that over thirty years ago I received some remarkable communications from him, through a rapping medium, the messages being spelled out by the alphabet, and his suggestions entirely ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... nothing happening. My hands felt quite cold, and I suggested we should stop the seance. Carrie and Mrs. James, as well as Cummings, would not agree to it. In about ten minutes' time there was some tilting towards me. I gave the alphabet, and it spelled out S P O O F. As I have heard both Gowing and Lupin use the word, and as I could hear Gowing silently laughing, I directly accused him of pushing the table. He denied it; but, I regret to say, I ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... movement. It mattered not at all that by religious ordinance the translation of the Koran into any other tongue was a sin. 'The Nationalists,' he tells us, 'have cut themselves off from the superstitious prejudice.' A further attempt was made to substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in the alphabet, but this seems to have presented insuperable difficulties, and I gather that ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that he was convinced that the ex-President could write very little more than his signature. We had all heard the old story that after he had become of age his newly wedded wife had taught him the alphabet, but it was known to very few that he remained to the last so ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... VI, and XII of Book I should be reviewed at frequent intervals until their contents become as familiar as the alphabet. This result can be obtained only by time and persistency. Before it is reached, the average pupil will have learned and forgotten over and over again the material involved. These chapters may sometimes be reviewed as wholes, but it is also ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... occurrences were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like "refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan would object, Uncle Alan mistrusting difficult words and words from Euclid. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... were not of a very high order; the books used by younger scholars being what were called hornbooks, which were made by pasting upon a board a piece of paper containing the alphabet and some lessons in spelling, and covering the whole with a very thin sheet of horn, which was fastened on the board as glass is fastened over a framed picture. Thus the children could see the letters and words ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... occupied with Freddie. The little boy knew his alphabet, but nothing more, so that his young teacher had to begin with him at the beginning ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... outside of the leaves, and now she took hold of the key with her two forefingers. "You got to be careful not to touch the Bible with your fingers," she explained, "or the charm won't work. Now I'll say over two verses, 't where the key's put in, and Mr. Barker, you got to repeat the alphabet at the same time; and when it comes to the first letter of the right name, the Bible will drop out of my fingers, all I can do. Now then! Set me as a ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... hour, ye suitors learn I pray, Is not each time the clock strikes through the day, In Cupid's alphabet I think I've read, Old Time, by lovers, likes not to be led; And since so closely he pursues his plan, 'Tis right to seize him, often as you can. Delays are dangerous, in love or war, And Nicaise is a ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... heart. As you have ever heard me, let your attention be tripled now. Read my letter once and again. Preserve it as a sacred deposit. Lay it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little skiff of your political system safe into the port of ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... origin of the word Alphabet? It is derived from the first two letters of the Greek ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... 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
... conceited. She undertook his education alone; Eremey Lukitch, buried in his economical fancies, had no thoughts to spare for it. It is true, he once punished his son with his own hand for mispronouncing a letter of the alphabet; but Eremey Lukitch had received a cruel and secret blow that day: his best dog had been crushed by a tree. Vassilissa Vassilyevna's efforts in regard Panteley's education did not, however, get beyond one terrific exertion; in the sweat of her brow ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... every 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 ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... applies to the next world, which is a comfort. She listened for the answer. Presently three distinct raps on the table signified assent. She then took from her reticule a card whereon were printed the alphabet, and numerals up to 10. The letters were separated by transverse lines. She gave me a pencil with these instructions: I was to think, not utter, my question, and then put the pencil on each of the letters in succession. When the letters were touched which spelt the answer, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... from ill-health. My parents let me play about in the open air, and did not put me to school until I had turned my sixth year. One day, playing in the shoemaker's shop, William Farrel asked me if I knew my letters. I answered 'No.' He then took down a primer from a shelf, and began to teach me the alphabet, at the same time amusing me by likening the letters to familiar objects in his shop. I soon learned to read, and in about six weeks I surprised my father by reading from an easy book which ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... tradition that the mystic writing on the wall was interpreted by Daniel reading downward instead of across [or rather, down, up, down: the form of writing known as boustrophedon, that is, the way an ox turns in a furrow]. If the handwriting was in an unknown alphabet Daniel must have said so, or why should his interpretation be accepted at once? But if the characters were those to which the beholders were accustomed, but arranged in an unthought-of direction, it is easy to realise the puzzle of the audience ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he laughed at everything that happened, morning, noon, and night; he played tricks on all his Professors instead of learning his lessons, and he could not keep grave long enough even to say the alphabet. He was so determined to look on the bright side of everything, that when people were angry with him he thought it was only their way of being amusing; and when they tried to punish him, he found it such a good ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... Baron Northbrook, a peerage which his son raised to an earldom; a second grandson qualified for a coronet as Baron Revelstoke; and a third is known to-day as Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, with half an alphabet of ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... and call the superintendent and be quick! Charley, brace up—lively—and come and write this out!" With his wonderful electric pen, the handle several hundreds of miles long, Watkins, unknown to his interlocutor, was printing in the Morse alphabet this ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... three different ways: by writing with our own hands; by placing our hands upon planchette, in which a pencil was placed which did the writing; by raps beneath the table, or by movements which indicated certain letters, when the alphabet was repeated aloud by one ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... 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
... add the Samaritan text in the last column but one, which is the very same with the Hebrew, except in some very few places, only differing in the Samaritan character (I think the true old Hebrew), the alphabet whereof you may learn in a day's time, either from the Prolegomena in Walton's Polyglot, or from his grammar. In a twelvemonth's time, sticking close to it in the forenoons, you will get twice through the Pentateuch; for I have done it four times the last year, and am ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... amendments were moved and adopted, but its main features were preserved, and the bill finally passed both houses with triumphant majorities. In the whole, twenty-one new clauses were added to the bill, which were distinguished by the letters of the alphabet; and Sheridan humourously suggested that three other clauses should be affixed, in order, as he observed, "to complete the horn-book of the present ministry;" The minority in the lords, in a protest, branded the bill as a measure ineffectual in its provisions, unconstitutional in its partial abolition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... short one—and two fonts of type, or their equivalent in penmanship. Two colors of ink, for example. You can put anything into anything. See here.' He reached up to a shelf and brought down a thin brown square note-book. 'Here's the alphabet,' he said; 'and here'—opening a little beyond—'is my use of it: one of my earliest exercises. I have put the first stanza of "Annabel Lee" into the second chapter of "Tom Jones."' He ignored the absent eye-glasses and picked out the red ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... spend at a banquet as many pounds as he spends men at a battle? Methinks I honour Geta, the Roman emperor, for a brave-minded fellow; for he commanded a banquet to be made him of all meats under the sun, which were served in after the order of the alphabet, and the clerk of the kitchen, following the last dish, which was two miles off from the foremost, brought him an index of their several names. Neither did he pingle, when it was set on the board, but for the space of three days ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... ambition—the ambition of his childhood—had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Greek system little is known beyond the fact that the letters of the alphabet were used to represent pitches. This method was probably accurate enough, but it was cumbersome, and did not afford any means of writing "measured music" nor did it give the eye any opportunity of grasping the general outline of the melody in its progression upward and downward, as staff notation ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... saying, 'Not so, presumptuous child of man; the things I have shown thee, and the greetings thou hast heard, and the songs wherewith I filled thee, cannot worthily be told in other than the language of spirits: and where is the alphabet of men that can fix that unearthly tongue,—or how shouldst thou from henceforth, or thy fellows upon earth, attain to its delicate conceptions? behold, all these thine intimates are wroth with thee; they discern evil ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of motions to the right or left of a needle or indicator. Those of France are of the class called dial telegraphs, in which an index, or needle, is carried around the face of a dial, around the circumference of which are placed the letters of the alphabet; any particular letter being designated by the brief stopping of the needle. A similar system has been used in Prussia; but, recently, the American, or recording instrument of Professor Morse, has been introduced into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... KENNAWAY and Alphabet COUTTS in same box as WYNDHAM; get out of it in different fashion. They, also, had prepared speeches, unknowing what turn affairs would take. Weren't going to waste them, so delivered them at length. They had everything but an audience. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... Josephus 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 and Second Chronicles, one book; Ezra and Nehemiah, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... good child, who, according to his mother, displayed remarkable peculiarities from the very day of his birth. For instance, he had a great objection to going to bed at the proper hour; he would pore time untold over his picture-alphabet, and hold lengthy conversations with the red cock depicted upon its last page, imploring him to exert himself in the cause of his young family, and not allow the maid-servant to carry them off and roast them. Lastly, he would often run away from his playfellows, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... called 'Durchschuss' by the printers here, consisting of leaden wedges of 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 words] ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... the time passes she will be alarmed by my silence, and then she will come or send some one to seek me.' A young student got interested in my case, and, by studying my eyes, thought that I was not entirely imbecile and unconscious. With the aid of an alphabet, he got me to spell my name and town in Illinois, and promised by signs to write to my family. But in an evil moment I told him of my cursed fortune, and in that moment I saw that he thought me a fool and an idiot. He went away, and I saw him no more. Yet I still hoped. I dreamed ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... 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 call them), ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... being considered an humble attempt to investigate a portion of intellectual physiology, an apology will scarcely be deemed necessary for a short digression to inquire into the powers and faculties of the human mind: and which, when determined, may be viewed as the alphabet of mental science. ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... have scarcely "got through" themselves, who have given little earnest study to God's Way of Salvation, who do not know the alphabet of Grace, and the means and methods of Grace,—these are often the pretended instructors at the anxious bench and in the meetings for inquirers. Now, we object strongly to such procedures. "Can ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... vermiformis of the science of pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or the proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat in the world, the Manx cat, has no ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... mankind, it is of all things the least mysterious and the most easy to be understood. The meanest capacity cannot be at a loss, if it begins its enquiries at the right point. Every art and science has some point, or alphabet, at which the study of that art or science begins, and by the assistance of which the progress is facilitated. The same method ought to be observed with respect to the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... capital letters. But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in order to make the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... quite unnecessary, my dear—my jolly old stenographer," said Bones firmly. "I object to shorthand on principle, and I shall always object to it. If people," he went on, "were intended to write shorthand, they would have been born without the alphabet. ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... boiling lead into water on All-Hallows E'en and it has assumed strange shapes, once—a boot, once—a coffin, once—a ship; and I have placed all the letters of the alphabet cut out of pasteboard by my bedside, and on one occasion (my door was locked, by the way, and I fully satisfied myself no one was in hiding) found, on awakening in the morning, the following word spelt out of them—"Merivale." ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... once, in a little market-town not far from Upsala, a peasant who lived there with his family, digging the earth during the week and singing in the choir on Sundays. This peasant had a little daughter to whom he taught the musical alphabet before she knew how to read. Daae's father was a great musician, perhaps without knowing it. Not a fiddler throughout the length and breadth of Scandinavia played as he did. His reputation was widespread and he was always invited to set the couples dancing at weddings and other festivals. His ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... 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. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the alphabet is that adopted by Dr. Brugsch-Bey. It relies for the first letter upon the authority of Plutarch, who asserts that the Egyptian abecedarium numbered the square of five (twenty-five); and that it opened with ——, which also expresses the god Thoth;—this is the case ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... difficulties of grasping his proposals). Perhaps there was, or was to have been, a sequel which would have stated his reforms more systematically; that this may have been the case appears from the statement on p. 25 that the alphabet "is preparing," and from the mention, on the last page, of "the ensuing Batl-dur" (i.e. battledore or hornbook). His remedy, briefly, is to replace digraphs by new symbols: "more Letters would do well in the Alfabet, but fewer in most words" (p. 25); and, like John Hart before ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... go for pleasure. When the bed was prepared, he wrote George's name in full in the pulverized earth, and sowed the same with cabbage seed. In due time, of course, the seed appeared in green, thrifty shoots, forming the letters as clearly as they stand in the alphabet. George discovered them one day. He was then seven or eight years old. He stood for a moment in ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... furnished the migrating bands which replenished the ranks of the Village Indians, as well as the continent, with inhabitants. It remained for the Village Indians to invent the process of smelting iron ore to attain to the Upper Status of barbarism, and, beyond that, to invent a phonetic alphabet to reach the first stage of civilization. One entire ethnical period intervened between the highest class of Indians and the ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... in this change, the man who more than all others was responsible for the conversion of the Germanic races to Christianity, in its Arian form, was the Gothic Bishop, Ulfilas (311-381), whose construction of an Alphabet and translation of the Scriptures into the language of his fellow-countrymen have secured for him imperishable renown among all who are interested in the history of human speech. Ulfilas, who has been well termed "The Apostle of the Goths", seems ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... 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 the gradual ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... teacher is innocent of the ways of modern pedagogy, and deep and complicated are the snares of the Tamil alphabet with its two hundred and sixteen elusive characters. Baffling, too, are the mysteries of number combination. "If six mangoes cost three annas, how much will one mango cost?" Arul never had an anna of her own, how should she know? The teachers bamboo falls on her hard, ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... from pu and bu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and the mat Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted actual letters for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only. Their system remained a syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... transliteration of Arabic words I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists. Nor is my sympathy with their prime object, namely to fit the Roman alphabet for supplanting all others. Those who learn languages, and many do so, by the eye as well as by the ear, well know the advantages of a special character to distinguish, for instance, Syriac from Arabic, Gujrati from Marathi. Again this Roman hand bewitched may ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... if all things have communion with all things, motion will rest, and rest will move; here is a reductio ad absurdum. Two out of the three hypotheses are thus seen to be false. The third (3) remains, which affirms that only certain things communicate with certain other things. In the alphabet and the scale there are some letters and notes which combine with others, and some which do not; and the laws according to which they combine or are separated are known to the grammarian and musician. And there is a science which teaches not only what ...
— Sophist • Plato
... spoil his children, and, in order to do this easily, he thinks fit to retain his present instructor, who is not very learned, but who takes part in their games and joyous sports with wonderful facility, who points out the letters of the alphabet to the little girl, who takes the little boys to mass, and who, no less obliging than the worthy Abbe P. of our acquaintance, would readily dance for Madame's amusement. Such a profession would not suit you, you who have a free, proud, and manly soul: you are refused; let us ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... in 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 ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... mistake is of no consequence with respect to the general force of the term as meaning the profitableness of Hermes. Athena's epithet of 'ageleia' has a parallel significance. [Transcriber's note: words inside single apostrophes are Greek, and use the Greek alphabet.] ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... opportunity of learning, he set himself 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 ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... thousands of ex-slaves, were there. One passion animated this dusky throng. To learn to read was the ambition of the bright colored boy, of his sedate but none the less eager sire, and of the veteran grandparent with white hair and with eyes that must learn the alphabet by the ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... was completed, always, and did not necessarily terminate with the last letter occurring in the cryptographic message. A subsequent inspection of this curious code has enabled Nayland Smith, by a process of simple deduction, to compile the entire alphabet employed by Dr. Fu-Manchu's agent, Samarkan, in communicating with his awful superior. With a little patience, any one of my readers my achieve the same result (and I should be pleased to hear from those ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... to the two tables, and to the 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 ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... 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 of their ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 connection with ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the first school-house 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 put their ...
— 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
... 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 enough for its ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... simple, humble fashion were the people groping toward freedom, and experimenting with the alphabet ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the Phoenician alphabet, parent of all the European alphabets, was derived from an Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... was 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 as fast as ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... to ask about these P's and Q's, but you may have noticed that he was shy, and he could not make up his mind to do so. He knew all about P's and Q's in the Alphabet Book at home, but he did not know how to mind them; he knew how to mind his mother,—sometimes, but how could you mind letters in a book, that couldn't ever say "Don't do that," like mother? He was very anxious on this point, for he knew that his time was growing ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and "reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she, too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet; and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those who dare less. The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and her lavish ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Mr. Morse is his register and alphabet. He himself eagerly disclaims any pretension to the original conception of the use of electricity as an errand-boy. Hundreds of people had thought of that and suggested it; but Morse was the first to give the errand-boy such a written message, that he could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... there be twenty-four groups of the brethren, according to the number of the twenty-four letters. And he prescribed that to each group should be given as a name a letter of the Greek alphabet, from Alpha and Beta, one after another, to Omega, in order that when the archimandrite asked for any one in so great a company, that one may be asked who is the second in each, how group Alpha is, or how the group Beta; again let ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... compendious delivery of the provincial eh-al), and other metropolitan refinements, amazing to all but cockneys, they cannot be indicated, save in the above imperfect manner, without the aid of a phonetic alphabet. He is dressed in somebody else's very second best as a coast-guardsman, and gives himself the airs of a stage tar with sufficient success to pass as a possible fish porter of bad character in casual employment during busy times at ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... prodigious memory, by which he was all his life pre-eminently distinguished, and which has often made the ablest of his friends imagine that with him, forgetting was a thing impossible. Before he knew a single letter of the alphabet, which he learnt far earlier, moreover, than most children, he would take into his hand his little pictured story-book, which had been perhaps only once, or possibly twice, read over to him, and pretend to read aloud out of it: those overlooking him scarcely crediting the fact of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... of information about the invention of the alphabet and the history of bookmaking up to the invention of movable types. 62 pp.; ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... 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
... to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles), to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. 'Leave me to my repose,' is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to 'take ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... continues to do its perfect work in a strangely resentful or apathetic manner even when there is no moral issue at stake.... Up to the year 1816, the best device for the application of electricity to telegraphy had involved a separate wire for each letter of the alphabet, but in that year Francis Ronalds constructed a successful line making use of a single wire. Realising the importance of his invention, he attempted to get the British government to take it up, but was informed that 'telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary, and no other than the one ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... 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
... intervened, during which the spirits became animated. The evening was confessedly a dull one, but matters appeared to brighten towards its close. The spirits were requested to spell the name by which I was known in the heavenly world. Our host commenced repeating the alphabet, and when he reached the letter 'P' a knock was heard. He began again, and the spirits knocked at the letter 'O.' I was puzzled, but waited for the end. The next letter knocked down was 'E.' I laughed, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... into which ground is worked—in the deepest and richest colors and their gradations that contemporary manufacturers could produce—subjects selected from the creation down to the life of Christ, in addition containing a complete alphabet of early Christian symbolism. The roof surfaces being one succession of over-arching curves become receptive of innumerable waves of light and broad unities of soft shadows, giving the whole an incomparable quality of tone and low ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... 19th 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 ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the schoolboy is seen arriving with his satchel and being presented with a hornbook by Nicostrata, the Latin muse Carmentis, who changed the Greek alphabet into the Latin. She admits him by the key of congruitas to the House of Wisdom ("Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars," Proverbs ix. 1). In the lowest story he begins his course in Donatus under a Bachelor of ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... ruled out of the realm of popular knowledge, and information of this class sought only in a clandestine manner. The people have suffered by deplorable ignorance on those topics, which should be as familiar to us as the alphabet. Dr. Napheys, by his scientific handling of the physiological points which relate to health, training, and development, has rendered a great service to the world. This, the press, and public men, have not been slow to acknowledge. The book ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... that I had no opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more definiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... the national profession of heathenism ended before our literature began, unless the annals mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are exceptions. The facilities of writing must have been very limited if the only alphabet in use was the Runic. It is, perhaps, a little too rigid to assume that the use of the Roman alphabet is to be dated strictly from the Conversion. As the use of Runes did not then suddenly terminate, but gradually receded before the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Amedee recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that the eldest of the Gerards had given him—that good Louise, so wise and serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind. The child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving, large, indented ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... endeavoured to expostulate with the natives by signs and gestures. To have looked at my companion, as, sympathizing with my sufferings, he strove to put an end to them, one would have thought that he was the deaf and dumb alphabet incarnated. Whether my tormentor yielded to Toby's entreaties, or paused from sheer exhaustion, I do not know; but all at once he ceased his operations, and at the same time the chief relinquishing his hold upon me, I fell back, faint and breathless with ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... farms, and it is no longer for your advantage that their strength should be spent in walking miles to work—if ever it was. You will have to do it. While Jack was left in brute ignorance, it was possible to satisfy him with brute comforts and control him with brute discipline; but teach Jack the alphabet, and he becomes as shrewd as his master. He begins to consider what he is worth, and to readjust the proportion between his work and his wages—to reflect that the larger share of the profit is, perhaps, due to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... not half a dozen persons in that room could have perceived any difference in the two readings of a thesis written in a language of which even the alphabet was unknown known to them, yet every individual among them could keenly appreciate the magnanimity of Ishmael, who would have sacrificed his scholastic fame for his friend's benefit, and the quickness and integrity of Walter in discovering ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... I could tell you something about their language. It sounds very soft and musical, but is very difficult to speak, and the characters make all one's previous knowledge of an alphabet utterly useless. We left Cronstadt on the afternoon of Wednesday, where neither was our baggage nor were we examined; indeed, half-a-dozen people might have smuggled themselves on board, and got away without ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... to the most amiable and forgiving nature; and at first the young negroes applied themselves with assiduity, and learned with an avidity which delighted some classes, and was no doubt a discomfiting surprise to others. It was astonishing to see the rapidity with which they mastered the alphabet of progress, and white mothers said to their indolent or refractory children, "Are you not ashamed to see little negroes more studious than yourself, making even greater progress according to their advantages, and in matters with which you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... editor of the 'Patriot,' is a phonographer. He took down the close of the stranger's address, and next day brought it to me written out in the ordinary alphabet. Let me read it to you. As you are acquainted with several modern languages, perhaps you can give me a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 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 small, with decimals. What maddened me ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... observation and when other signs of masturbation existed; and in these cases experimental observation also showed a diminution of the power of attention. The test applied was to erase some particular letter of the alphabet from one page of a book. When such a test is employed, the practice of masturbation is said to have an unfavourable effect, and to cause mistakes. I do not think that these so-called precise investigations are of much value, for suggestion on the part of the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... sentimental 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
... The melody 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, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... kind 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... well known, and the 'cute lad becomes a dummer Junge. Mrs. Melville thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import of a single word.' Even in Europe education, till lately, exercised the judgment too little, the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... college of Navarre a great quantity of ancient documents are preserved, many of which relate to this curious subject. They were deposited there by M. Jean Aubert in 1623, accompanied by an inventory of them, divided into four parts by the first four letters of the alphabet. In the fourth, under D. 18, there is a chapter entitled "Des Libraires Appretiateurs, Jurez et Enlumineurs," which contains much interesting matter relating to the early history of bookselling.[65] These ancient statutes, collected and printed by the University in the year 1652,[66] ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... transformation (as in the case of people who are asleep or out of their senses), or through the coordination of the phantasms, at the command of reason, for the purpose of understanding something. For just as the various arrangements of the letters of the alphabet convey various ideas to the understanding, so the various coordinations of the phantasms produce various intelligible species ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... notation by the nine digits and the cipher, was not introduced until the tenth century, but on account of its superior excellence, has since superseded every other. Previous to this great discovery, the letters of the alphabet were used to denote numbers, each letter having the power of a number as well as a sound. The same system is still retained among us for certain purposes. The Roman letters I. V. X. L. C. D. M., have each the power of expressing ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... since none of the letters of the alphabet were known to her; but when she conveyed the idea that she did not know the name of the visitor, it was certainly a stretch of the truth; but then she did not know as "Marse Hesden" would care about his mother knowing the name of his visitor, and she had ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... 1873, she began teaching me the alphabet, when I was thirteen years old. I had no mother and no home or friend, other than Judge S——, in whose family ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... copy of his treatise on the English and German languages, as preliminary to an etymological dictionary he meditated, I went into explanations with him of an easy process for simplifying the study of the Anglo-Saxon, and lessening the terrors and difficulties presented by it's rude alphabet, and unformed orthography. But this is a subject beyond the bounds of a letter, as it was beyond the bounds of a report to the legislature. Mr. Crofts died, I believe, before any progress was made in the work ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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, lecture iv, p. 132. For the prevailing view ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... 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 everything under the age of ten! Oh, for factories for the children of the rich! The age of prying curiosity is from four-and-a-half to nine, and Fonche himself might get a lesson in police from an urchin in his alphabet. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... catalog, program. If the student employs these forms, he must use them consistently. Many writers oppose simplified spelling; many advocate it; many compromise. Others desire to supplant our present alphabet with one more nearly phonetic, and prefer, until this fundamental reform takes place, to preserve our present spelling ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... may be called the Vai alphabet. Every morning the small boys are taught first to use skilfully this weapon. In addition they are taught to throw the spear and to wield the sword. In the afternoon they are taken on a hunt for small game, and later are given practice in target ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... the encyclopedia from Safety-lamps to Stranglers. He could explain with strange words and in long, balanced sentences everything about the British army that began with an S, except only those things whose second letter stood farther down in the alphabet than T. But the elements of knowledge kept dropping in, at first on perfunctory calls, visitors that disappeared when you turned to speak with them, but that later came to stay. The four young men were like children with a "roll-the-seven-number-eight-shot-into-the ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... Thorn, "I should want to brush up my Algebra considerably before I could hope to find x, y, and z in such a confusion of the alphabet." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... are those of the Greek alphabet, and the student if not familiar with it is advised to consult a ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... follies, in that populous mart; and his exquisite sensibility to the beautiful and magnificent in nature, was abundantly ministered to by the surrounding country. We are told that he had been by some odd chance taught his alphabet, and his first lesson in "reading made easy," out of a black-letter Bible! That accident may have had its share in forming his taste for old-fashioned literature. But he was an attorney's clerk! The very name of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... did not know that the Gaelic name for the sun was feminine? Can they 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 ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... around him, he ultimately arrives at the conclusion of the unity of God"[19]; but since this process is accomplished by an arrangement of the Divine Emanations under the name of the Ten Sephiroths, and in the permutation of numerals and of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, it would certainly convey no such idea—nor probably indeed any idea at all—to the mind uninitiated into Cabalistic systems. The Sepher Yetzirah is in fact admittedly a work of extraordinary obscurity[20] and almost certainly ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... this giant; but after he had cut off his opponent's head and had been healed with precious balm by the beautiful princess, he buried the giant's body in a deep grave and placed above it a great stone engraved in the Ogham alphabet—in which all the letters are ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Leper leprulo. Leprosy lepro. Leprous lepra. Less malpli. Lessee luanto. Lessen plimalgrandigi. Lesson leciono. Lessor luiganto. Let (house, etc.) luigi. Let (before an infinitive) lasi. Let down mallevi. Lethargy letargio. Letter, capital granda litero. Letter (alphabet) litero. Letter (epistle) letero. Letter (registered) rekomendita letero. Letter of advice ricevavizo. Letter of exchange kambio. Letter-box posxta kesto, leterkesto. Letter-carrier (postman) leteristo. Letter-case leterujo. Lettuce laktuko. [Error ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... how big the mountain is we might despair of digging it down by spadefuls, though the faith that digs is the one that can say with best hopes for obedience, "Be thou removed and cast into the sea." Few children would have courage to begin the alphabet as a step to learning if they knew what a long and heavy road is to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... much like attempting to increase the density of a stone, or to reduce the alphabet to a tabloid. I therefore shall make no effort to add another failure to the several abstracts of this Report. The heads of his propositions are sufficient. The Report is accessible to all who find the subject ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Child's New Plaything. Draper & Edwards, Boston. Reprint. Contained alphabet in rhyme, proverbs, fables, and stories: St. George and the Dragon; Fortunatus; Guy of Warwick; Brother and Sister; Reynard the Fox; and ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... studied hard under a very learned man, called Master Tubal Holofermes, and, after studying with him for five years and three months, he learnt so much that he was able to say the alphabet backwards. About this time, the king of Numidia sent out of the country of Africa to Grangousier, the hugest and most enormous mare that was ever seen. She was as large as six elephants, and of a burnt sorrel colour ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... discovery of the continent by Europeans. [Footnote: Since the above was in type one of the assistants of the Ethnological Bureau discovered in a small mound in east Tennessee a stone with letters of the Cherokee alphabet rudely carved upon it. It was not an intensive burial, hence it is evident that the mound must have been built since 1820, or that Guess was not the ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... else—if there were anything else—that moujiks cared about. This need, however, is not felt now. When, so soon after his de'but in high politics, M. Kerensky was superseded by M. Lenin, Russian was forthwith deemed a not quite nice language, even for children. Russia's alphabet was withdrawn from the nurseries as abruptly as it had been brought in, and le chapean de la cousine du jardinier was re-indued ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... to view them as bits of analysis, if I may so express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and therefore more complex character. As children learn the alphabet from cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still, that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of character, may ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... listeners. Brother Fee said his object in requesting 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
... With the alphabet Lloyd George absorbed the wrongs of his people and they were many. The Welsh had a double bondage: the grasp of the Landlord and the Thrall of the Church. All about him quivered the aspiration for a free land, a free people and a free religion. In those days Wales was like another Ireland ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... having objected to hear the play read, "because their respective parts had not been previously submitted to them."—Sunday Times.—[We are of opinion that they were decidedly right. One might as well expect a child to spell without learning the alphabet, as either of the above persons to understand Knowles, unless enlightened by a long ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... girl about twenty, rather thin, and apparently very exhausted; gradually a party of ten assembled, and we gathered round the witch's table. The majority were ladies—those adorers of the marvellous! The names of friends were called for; the ladies took the alphabet, and running over it with the point of a pencil, the spirit rapped as the wished-for letter was reached. John Davis was soon spelt, each letter probably having been indicated by the tremulous touch ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... At first he tried writing within oblongs cut out of cardboard, but the result was apt to be illegible. In 1891 he conceived the device of having a series of squares cut out in card, and inventing an alphabet, of which each letter was made of lines, which could be written along the edges of the squares, and dots, which could be marked at the corners. The thing worked well, and he named it the "Typhlograph," but, at the suggestion of one of his brother-students, this was subsequently ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... wire ended in a stalk mounted with a little ball of elder-wood suspended by a silk thread. When a stream of electricity, no matter how slight., was sent through the wire, the elder-ball at the opposite end was repelled, such movement designating some letter of the alphabet. A few years later we find Arthur Young, in his Travels in France, describing a similar machine invented by a M. Lomond of Paris, the action of which he also describes.[12] In these and similar cases, though the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... adieu!" Another wall bears the following warning: "This is no place for idlers; go away, good-for-nothing." It is curious to read the names Sodom and Gomorrah, evidently scribbled by a Jew. Low down on the walls small schoolboys have practised writing the Greek alphabet, showing that Greek was included in their curriculum. And once were found written in charcoal, and only partly legible, the words, "Enjoy the fire, Christian," a scoff at the martyrs who, soaked in tar, were burned as torches in ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was kept at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to learn, and willing enough, when my mother and I had lived alone together. I can faintly remember learning the alphabet at her knee. To this day, 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 Q and S, seem to present themselves again before me as they used to do. But they recall no feeling of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... to be imparted to a child by conversation than by any other means (for by this system education is divested of its drudgery), during the first six years of her life Amber knew little more than the letters of the alphabet. It was not until her desire of information was excited to such a degree as to render her anxious to obtain her own means of acquiring it that Amber was taught to read; and then it was at her own request. Edward Forster was aware that a child of six years ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... land of ours, I have wondered continually what some of the Christian converts of China would think could they visit our shores and go into the mountains in our Southern land and see the women there, how perfectly ignorant they are, some of them not even knowing their alphabet, and, what is sadder still, not even knowing that they are hundreds of years behind the women living but a few miles from their mountain home. If these Chinese converts could go down from the mountains into the ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... long." Leigh could not master the V of the alphabet yet. "'Cause I'm going away pretty soon, Miss Jane say. You know my mamma's dead." The little face was very grave now. "And my Uncle Jim out in Kansas wants me. I'm ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... learned my call in a flash. I must teach her the whole alphabet, and then will have some tall fun and circumvent that ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... rows of little 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 be ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... After a time they stayed at certain profitable places a twelvemonth, still trading from their ships. Then came the fixed factory, and about it grew the trading colony.[2] The Phoenician trading post wove together the fabric of oriental civilization, brought arts and the alphabet to Greece, brought the elements of civilization to northern Africa, and disseminated eastern culture through the Mediterranean system of lands. It blended races and customs, developed commercial confidence, fostered the custom of depending on outside nations ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... this time and of other times; if I chose I could 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 ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... ideas of her mimetic art, her religious notions, her legal forms, and a vast number of her customs and usages. But Babylonia herself, so far as we know, drew her stores from no foreign country. Hers was apparently the genius which excogitated an alphabet—worked out the simpler problems of arithmetic—invented implements for measuring the lapse of time—conceived the idea of raising enormous structures with the poorest of all materials, clay—discovered the art of polishing, boring, and engraving gems—reproduced with ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... 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 ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... accustomed to be spoken to after that fashion," cried the dwarf angrily; "my name is not 'little chap,' but 'Mr. Alphabet,' though some dare to call me A B C. I ought to be treated with respect, for I am ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... morning was secured, Theodose felt the necessity of beginning his courtship of Celeste. It was high time, he thought, to bring about a quarrel between the lovers. He did not, therefore, hesitate to apply his ear to the door of the salon before entering it, in order to discover what letters of the alphabet of love they were spelling; he was even invited to commit this domestic treachery by sounds from within, which seemed to say that they were disputing. Love, according to one of our poets, is a privilege which two persons mutually take advantage of to cause each other, reciprocally, a great ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... whatever in arranging them correctly without referring to the 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"
... afterwards in things, to the very foundations. Guttemberg; without knowing it, was the mechanist of the New World. In creating the communication of ideas, he had assured the independence of reason. Every letter of this alphabet which left his fingers, contained in it, more power than the armies of kings, and the thunders of pontiffs. It was mind which he furnished with language. These two powers were the mistresses of man, as they were hereafter of mankind. The intellectual world was born of a material ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to her mind, she repeated them aloud, then,—finding that all her efforts elicited nothing but a constant "No,"—she said, "Come, since this plan does not answer, I will have recourse to another." She then recited all the letters of the alphabet from A down to N. When she arrived at that letter the paralytic made her understand that she had spoken the initial letter of the thing he wanted. "Ah," said Valentine, "the thing you desire begins with the letter N; it is with N that we have to do, then. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Koster) of Haarlem. The book said that he went on a picnic with his family, and while idly carving his name on the trunk of a beech tree he conceived the idea that he might in the same way make individual letters of the alphabet on wooden blocks, ink them ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... celebrated heroes of antiquity; if they will not be reduced to a consistency, lay them all in a heap upon him. But be sure they are qualities which your patron would be thought to have; and, to prevent any mistake which the world may be subject to, select from the alphabet those capital letters that compose his name, and set them at the head of a dedication before your poem. However, do not absolutely observe the exact quantity of these virtues, it not being determined whether or no it be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... the curate of a village church, about five miles from Amwell. I was born in the parsonage-house, which joins the church-yard. The first thing I can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet from the letters on a tombstone that stood at the head of my mother's grave. I used to tap at my father's study-door; I think I now hear him say, "Who is there?—What do you want, little girl?" "Go and see mamma. Go and learn pretty ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... primitive letters of the old northern alphabet. In a few passages Cynewulf uses each rune to represent not only a letter but a word beginning with that letter. Thus the rune-equivalent of C stands for cene (keen, courageous), Y for yfel (evil, in the sense of wretched), N for nyd (need), W ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her presence than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I had got no further than the A B C, while she had learned the whole alphabet, and for many years had finished the Y and Z. When she went out of this life into the next, what a shout there must have been in heaven, from the front door clear up to the back seat in the highest ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... hardly hope, in four short years, to surmount the disadvantages of my youth, and gain academical distinction. To him, who in his 20th year, learnt his Greek alphabet, a first class at College must be a hopless aim; while an University prize must be beyond the reach of one who merely began to speak English about his twentieth year. Aware of these circumstances, the friends whom I consult have advised me to collect (should necessary studies ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... this, but either he selected a stupid subject, or his mode of teaching was not good, for he made wonderfully little progress. For a week he was trying to teach his pupil Tommy Toad, as he called him, three letters of the alphabet, and at the end of the time he could not tell B from C. Mr Talbot took care also that we should not be idle, and kept us knotting and splicing and doing all sorts of work aloft. We were approaching our port, and were congratulating ourselves ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... Oh, yes, we know," interrupted Allen; "Janet does not think anyone worth listening to that hasn't got a whole alphabet tacked behind ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... liked to confess. Mme. de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She knew that her young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new and noble family, except in such matters as related to the intellect, upon which, having 'got as far' as Harmony and the Greek alphabet, she was specially enlightened) despised Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian, who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own contemporaries, Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... cripple came to the sick man, and received his first lesson; and every day, at an appointed hour, he was in Mr. Croft's room, eager for the instruction he received. Quickly he mastered the alphabet, and as quickly learned to construct small words, preparatory to combining them in ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... same kind of garment, suited for war. The women wear the toga below the knee, but the men above. And both sexes are instructed in all the arts together. When this has been done as a start, and before their third year, the boys learn the language and the alphabet on the walls by walking round them. They have four leaders, and four elders, the first to direct them, the second to teach them, and these are men approved beyond all others. After some time they exercise themselves with gymnastics, running, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... to bear to a person to whom it was directed and so charmed was he with the beautiful inscription drawn upon it that he was seized with an unconquerable desire to learn the mystery it contained. To this end he persuaded a little boy of his master's to teach him the letters of the alphabet. He was discovered in the act and whipped. His curiosity, however, to learn the secret, which was locked up in those mysterious characters, was only increased, and he was detected in another attempt, and accordingly chastised. By this time he had ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... and she held out 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... name only a few more. The invention of chairs, though adding to human convenience, has tended to produce wrong posture, from which spinal, nervous and digestive disturbances follow. The invention of the alphabet and of printing has made possible the accumulation of knowledge, but has promoted eye-strain with a great train of attendant evils. The device of division of labor has created much wealth, but destroyed the normal balance of mental and physical work, recreation ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... 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 the covenant and the seven-pronged candlestick ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... into the life of the land farmer because it gives obviously a mere hint of learning. It has been the boast of its advocates that it taught only the "three Rs." Its training for life is rudimentary only: it gives but an alphabet. The land farmer expected to live in his group. Secure in his own acres and believing himself "as good as anybody," he relied for his son and daughter not upon trained skill, but upon native abilities, sterling character, independence and industry. Of ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... laid out a plan for teaching others more ignorant than herself. She cut out of thin pieces of wood ten sets of large and small letters of the alphabet, and carried these with her when she went from house to house. When she came to Billy Wilson's she threw down the letters all in a heap, and Billy picked them out and sorted them ...
— Goody Two-Shoes • Unknown
... side by side with their conquerors. There was a dragoonist flavor about the dust; a military flourish about the tombstones. A., of His Majesty's regiment; B., officer of such a battalion of His Majesty's so-and-so regiment; C., D., and all the rest of the alphabet, once grand officers in His Majesty's service, now dust here as the royal majesties they served are dust elsewhere. Went over to the ancient grave-digger, who was shovelling out in a weakly manner decayed coffin, skull, ribs, bones, fat earth—so fat and greasy-looking, ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... grow up a nidiot," said she, drawing her mouth down as she had seen Prudy do when beseeching her to learn the alphabet. "Don't he know all the letters, ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May
... 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 was not satisfactory, till after we had gained some knowledge of ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... 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 of their merit,—the late Dr Stewart of Luss,—who, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Sayce considers Zuzim and Zamzummim to be two readings of the same word Zamzum, written in cuneiform characters on the original document. The sounds represented, in the Hebrew alphabet, by the letters m and w, are expressed in the Chaldaean syllabary by the same character, and a Hebrew or Babylonian scribe, who had no other means of telling the true pronunciation of a race-name mentioned ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... "The alphabet belongs equally to the whole human race; no one can deny that. I have taken eight letters and combined them in such a way as to produce the word Seingalt. It pleased me, and I have adopted it as my surname, being firmly persuaded that as no one had borne it before no one could deprive ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... been taught a number of tricks. We could sneeze and cough, and be dead dogs, and say our prayers, and stand on our heads, and mount a ladder and say the alphabet,—this was the hardest of all, and it took Miss Laura a long time to teach us. We never began till a book was laid before us. Then we stared at it, and Miss Laura said, "Begin, Joe ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... Huc, in his journey to Thibet, gives an account of a singular tree, bearing this title, and of which the peculiarity is that its leaves and bark are covered with well-defined characters of the Thibetian alphabet. The tree seen by MM. Huc and Gabet appeared to them to be of great {385} age, and is said by the inhabitants to be the only one of its kind known in the country. According to the account given by these travellers, the letters would appear to be formed by the veins of the leaves; the resemblance ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... day-school in 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 already taught her many pretty devices in this art; and when she found that at the school they ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the transliteration of Arabic words I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists. Nor is my sympathy with their prime object, namely to fit the Roman alphabet for supplanting all others. Those who learn languages, and many do so, by the eye as well as by the ear, well know the advantages of a special character to distinguish, for instance, Syriac from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 name, also fire and ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... them under drivers, yet careful that they are not hard-pushed? Too humane forsooth to stint the stomachs of their slaves, yet force their minds to starve, and brandish over them pains and penalties, if they dare to reach forth for the smallest crumb of knowledge, even a letter of the alphabet! ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... describes himself here in the very words which in the 4th verse are descriptive of the eternal subsistence of the person of the Father. "Alpha and Omega," the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, are explained in the words,—"the beginning and the ending." This language is not to be understood as expressing or defining the duration of the Godhead only; but it points also to the divine purpose and providence. To the same purpose speaks our Redeemer under the name of ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... 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 ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... a little to one side and took a critical survey of the alphabet before him. His eye passed once down and once up the procession, then looking up at Jack with a grin, he said, "He's 'iding, I reckon, governor. That there dorg'll have to start with a B ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... for his messages. He chose to live with them in their suffering and out of his weeping pointed them to a star of hope. There are five independent poems in as many chapters. Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 have each 22 verses or just the number of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 3 has 66 verses or just three times the number of the alphabet. The first four chapters are acrostic, that is each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In chapter three, each letter is used in order and is three times repeated as ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... occupied with her sewing; and near them, on a stool, sat Angela, the wife of Agricola, nursing her last-born child, while the gentle Magdalen, with the eldest boy in her lap, was occupied in teaching him the letters of the alphabet. Agricola had just returned from the fields, and was beginning to unyoke his cattle, when, struck, like me, no doubt, with this picture, he stood gazing on it for a moment, with his hand still leaning on the yoke, beneath which bent submissive the broad foreheads of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... these, our times, with daily wonders big, A Lettered peer is like a lettered pig; Both know their Alphabet, but who, from thence, Infers that peers or pigs have manly sense? Still less that such should woo the graceful nine; Parnassus was not ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Latin, 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
... deal sometimes," chuckled Agnes, who did not much mind having her name shortened. "Wait till I look up in my scrap book the name of that special cheese which is made by the Swiss for use in Passion Play week. It's got all the letters of the alphabet in it twice." ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... books of Anticatones, and a poem called Iter; and many other works. Julius and Augustus devised means of writing one letter for another, and so concealing what they wrote. For Julius put the fourth letter for the first, and so on through the alphabet; whilst Augustus used the second for the first, the third for the second, and so throughout. He is said in the greatest difficulties of affairs during the Mutinensian War to have read and written and even declaimed every day. Tiberius ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... exact repetition of their plaint. Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "Ue haaneinei" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side." The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... proposals in recent decades to do away with the Chinese characters and to introduce an alphabet in their place. They have all proved to be unsatisfactory so far, because the character of the Chinese language, as it is at this moment, is unsuited to an alphabetical script. They would also destroy China's cultural unity: there are many dialects in China that ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... 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
... country where the merry haymakers 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 Ben Holt, and ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... down. In the afternoon the first plenary sitting took place, the proceedings being opened by the Prince of Bavaria and then led by Dr. Kuehlmann. It was decided that the Powers should take it in turns to preside, in order of the Latin alphabet as to their names, i.e. Allemagne, Autriche, etc. Dr. Kuehlmann requested Hr. Joffe to tell us the principles on which he considered a future peace should be based, and the Russian delegate then went through the six main tenets already ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... author, my claim to enter upon this self-contained symposium which I am about to present is somewhat stronger. Authors, of course, read all the reviews of their books, even that common American variety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote— summarize—quote—quote—summarize—quote, and so on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. I have read all the reviews of my books except those which clipping bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... language-learning. The skeleton outline of grammatical theory with concrete examples afforded by Esperanto would shield against vitiating initial mistakes, in much the same way as the use of a scientific phonetic alphabet, when a foreign language is presented for the first time to the English beginner in written form, shields him against carrying over his native mixed vowel system to languages which use the same letters as English, but give quite ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... beginning, the groundwork for 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,' 'agree,' &c. In the present instance we see it doubled no less ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages, yet the Japanese, Coreans and Chinese use the same letters to write with, just as English, Germans, French and Spaniards all employ one and the same alphabet. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... that could be crammed into him. Has it brought him into our temple, in the spirit? No. Have we had any ignorant brothers and sisters that didn't know round O from crooked S, come in among us meanwhile? Many. Then the angels are NOT learned; then they don't so much as know their alphabet. And now, my friends and fellow-sinners, having brought it to that, perhaps some brother present - perhaps you, Brother Gimblet - will pray ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... wonderful in that," said I; "we are at the 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, and perhaps that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... messages by running through the alphabet till the spirit interpreter knocked at the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... the account is given is what is called the language of symbols. Just as here we have words which stand for things—as the word "table" is a symbol for a recognised article of a certain kind—so do symbols stand for objects on higher planes. They are a pictorial alphabet, used by all myth-writers, and each has its recognised meaning. A symbol is used to signify a certain object just as words are used down here to distinguish one thing from another, and so a knowledge of symbols is necessary for the reading of a myth. For the original ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... been to school, and so she didn't even know the alphabet; but Genevieve sat down patiently to teach her, and found truly that much patience was necessary to accomplish the work she had undertaken. Hepsa would soon grow discouraged when she found so much to learn, and saw her little ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... when this truth dawned upon her mind. I saw that the great obstacle was overcome, and that henceforward nothing but plain and straightforward efforts were to be used. The next step was to procure a set of metal types, with the different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends: also a board in which were square holes, into which holes she could set the types, so that the letters on their ends could alone be felt above the surface. She was exercised for several weeks in ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... the Dewey's serious dilemma. No spoken word was necessary to impress upon the men the critical situation. Sleep was out of the question. Jack rambled into the wireless room, where he tried to calm his restless spirits by rattling away on the key at the code alphabet. Lately he had been giving much attention to mastering the operation of the wireless apparatus and under the direction of Sammy Smith had ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... was variously estimated. Josephus gives twenty-two, which was the usual number among Christian writers in the second, third, and fourth centuries, having been derived perhaps from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Origen, Jerome, and others have it. It continued longest among the teachers of the Greek Church, and is even in Nicephorus's stichometry.(83) The enumeration in question has Ruth with Judges, and Lamentations with Jeremiah. In Epiphanius(84) the number twenty-seven ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto "Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... I had to interrupt my lessons from illness, but Sheykh Yussuf came again last night. I have mastered Abba shedda o mus beteen—ibbi shedda o heftedeen, etc. Oh dear, what must poor Arab children suffer in learning ABC! It is a terrible alphabet, and the shekel (points) are desesperants; but now I stick for want of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... tenant had moved out, alarmed by mysterious rappings. The Foxes did not hear these sounds until 1848, and then Kate, hardly more than a child, began questioning the rappings, and having opened what seemed to be intelligent communication, suggested the use of the alphabet. That was the beginning of what spiritualists call the "science of materialization." The exhibitions consisted of the usual phenomena, table turning, spirit rapping and the moving of large bodies by invisible means. The two young women gave public s['e]ances throughout the country, arousing ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... G., H., I., and J. And why is this precious knowledge imparted to us? Why are we not also taught what else they did during the day? Why do we learn nothing of Mr. and Mrs. Y. and Z., at the other end of the alphabet, in Baxter Street? For these good folks who are mentioned are in no way distinguished except for riches. If, indeed, they had done or said or written anything memorable, if they had painted fine pictures, or carved ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... matters Europe owes a balance of indebtedness to Asia, and by far the greater part of it to the Semites. The Phoenician alphabet and Arabian numerals are capital borrowed and yielding how enormous a usufruct! Above all, Asiatic religions—albeit the greatest of them was the child of Hellas as well as of Judaea—have conquered the whole world save a few savage tribes. Ever since the cry of "There ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the private Members got their own back when the first amendment to the Address was moved by Mr. JOYNSON-HICKS. The Member for Brentford, who knows the alphabet of aviation from Aeroplane to Zeppelin, complained that the air-service, like his own constituency in legendary times, was under Dual Control, and urged that it should be placed under ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... 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, learne to know ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... old Nursery favourites are here offered to our Young Friends—Nursery Alphabet, Sing-a-Song of Sixpence, The Frog's Wooing, The Three Little Pigs, Puss in Boots, have for many generations delighted the Nurseries of Great Britain. We trust that they and their worthy new companion, The Ugly Duckling, which has come to us from over the Sea, will still ...
— Aunt Friendly's Picture Book. - Containing Thirty-six Pages in Colour by Kronheim • Anonymous
... out of the realm of popular knowledge, and information of this class sought only in a clandestine manner. The people have suffered by deplorable ignorance on those topics, which should be as familiar to us as the alphabet. Dr. Napheys, by his scientific handling of the physiological points which relate to health, training, and development, has rendered a great service to the world. This, the press, and public men, have not been ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that the eldest of the Gerards had given him—that good Louise, so wise and serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind. The child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving, large, indented leaves ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... in a corner of the room, where the ivy from the ceiling 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 stains and the worn, streaked patches where ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... pounds, and specimens that are larger may be worth many times that amount. Figures of men, horses, bears, dogs, and various animals, including dragons, are to be seen, as well as letters of the alphabet, triangles, or other inanimate objects, some trees being cleverly made to look like jugs, bottles, and bowls. Occasionally, a singular change has been made in a tree; thus, what was a boy with a rake, by a little alteration becomes a soldier ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... primer of information about the invention of the alphabet and the history of bookmaking up to the invention of movable types. 62pp.; illustrated; ...
— The Uses of Italic - A Primer of Information Regarding the Origin and Uses of Italic Letters • Frederick W. Hamilton
... hurl its anathemas against those who opposed that revision. The share taken in this excommunication by the Oriental patriarchs rather lessened than added to its weight, since the dissenters denied to Greek and Syrian bishops, who knew not a letter of the Slavonic alphabet, the right of passing judgment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... 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 space enough for ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... was placed in the middle of a building, carefully purified on all sides by Arabian perfumes; and a plain round dish was placed upon it, made of different metals. On the outer side of which the four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet were engraved with great skill, being separated from one another by distances measured with ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks can do, and does, this miracle,—thanks to the Letters of the Alphabet, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Moses Ansell read out that night to his Kinder, after tea-supper, by the light of the one candle, was prefaced with a note of pathos. "These stories have we gathered together from the Gemorah and the Midrash, wonderful stories, and we have translated the beautiful stories, using the Hebrew alphabet so that every one, little or big, shall be able to read them, and shall know that there is a God in the world who forsaketh not His people Israel and who even for us will likewise work miracles and wonders and will send us the righteous Redeemer speedily ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Chicago and turned over to the department of anthropology. The learned expounders of this science were not long in devising a simple means of communication. The twelve unfortunates were seated upon a recitation bench and a doctor of philosophy wrote out an alphabet upon ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... 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
... the 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he pored over the alphabet, proudly said A and B, and thought that he knew them, but on the morrow they were gone, and all the work was to be done over again. Mr. Bhaer had infinite patience with him, and kept on in spite of the apparent hopelessness of the task, not caring for ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 the window ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... my dear Cousin Leo is in the Senate, but he is in the heraldry department, and I don't know any of the real ones. They are all some kind of Germans—Gay, Fay, Day—tout l'alphabet, or else all sorts of Ivanoffs, Simenoffs, Nikitines, or else Ivanenkos, Simonenkos, Nikitenkos, pour varier. Des gens de l'autre monde. Well, it is all the same. I'll tell my husband, he knows them. He ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... and elaborate; for it was the bent of the Chancellor's mind to trace the law to its sources in the ancient world, and fortify his positions by citations from Greek and Latin authors. The Greek passages were a plague to the copyist, who knew not the alphabet of that language, but copied it, so to ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... forgotten to bring a reading book, and now put Hephzibah through the alphabet, which she seemed to know perfectly, calling each letter by its right name. Daisy then asked if she could read words; and getting an assenting nod again, she tried her in that. But here Hephzibah's education was defective; she ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... 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; but when the elements are transferred into the long ...
— Statesman • Plato
... children came to Sinai, they accepted thee, and they honored thee. And now, on the day of their distress, thou standest up against them?" Hearing this, the Torah stepped aside, and did not testify. "Let the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in which Torah is written come and testify against Israel," said God. They appeared without delay, and Alef, the first letter, was about to testify against Israel, when Abraham interrupted it with the words: "Thou chief ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... rusks, constituted Miss Granger's notion of infant food. She would have excluded milk, as bilious, and would have forbidden sugar, as a creator of acidity; and then, when the little victim was about one and a half, she would have seated it before the most dry-as-dust edition of the alphabet, and driven it triumphantly upon the first stage on the high-road to ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... enormous output of Brick, Cheddar and Swiss. To attempt to classify and describe all of these would be impossible, so we will content ourselves by picking a few of the cold and hot, the plain and the fancy, the familiar and the exotic. Let's use the alphabet ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... 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 ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... important 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
... make amends. My wife well home in the evening from the play; which I was glad of, it being cold and dark, and she having her necklace of pearl on, and none but Mercer with her. Spent the evening in fitting my books, to have the number set upon each, in order to my having an alphabet of my whole, which will be of great ease to me. This day Captain Batters come from sea in his fireship and come to see me, poor man, as his patron, and a poor painful wretch he is as can be. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... souls, and recognize no other person whomsoever as commander. They all affixed their seals to this covenant; but some of them, to show their superior learning, put their initials, or what they used as such, for some of these learned Thebans knew only two or three letters of the alphabet, which they put down, though they happened not to be their real initials. An officer on the part of Sindhia, who was to have commanded these troops, was present at this reinstallation of the Begam, and glad to take, as a compensation ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... stitches in it. She likewise set up housekeeping in the sideboard, and managed a microscopic cooking stove with a skill that brought tears of pride to Hannah's eyes, while Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels. The boy early developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father and distracted his mother, for he tried to imitate every machine he saw, and kept the nursery ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... the difficulty of drawing them, which takes time and patience, I would almost say that they are more suitable than the Latin alphabet. The ancient Egyptian had our vowels; our o, which is only final and is not like that of the Spanish, which is a vowel between o and u. Like us, the Egyptians lacked the true sound of e, and in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... (in the Less-Read Poets) cuts down the extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of nobodies—Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the less-read would have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne (for instance) ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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 third ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... several sizes, a number were constructed of several pieces of board nailed together—and split in the process—no two were shaped alike, except for generalities, and no one was straight. However, they were larger than a man's two fists, they were gaudily painted, and the alphabet was sprinkled upon them with prodigal generosity. There were even hieroglyphics upon them, which the carpenter described as birds and animals. They were certainly more than any timid child could ever ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... 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
... until he had attained the ripe age of twelve. It may even have been that specific rumors of the signs, symbols, and hieroglyphics used in educational institutions had reached him in the obscurity of his cranberry meadows. At all events, when confronted by the alphabet chart, whose huge black capitals were intended to capture the wandering eyes of the infant class, Alcestis exhibited unusual, almost unnatural, excitement. "That is 'A,' my boy," said the teacher genially, as she pointed to the first character on the chart. "Good God, is ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... frequently to Josephine. The first he admired impersonally for her housewifely skill, and smiled at secretly for her purely feminine outlook upon life and her positive views upon subjects of which she knew not half the alphabet. He had discovered that Mason did indeed refrain from smoking in the house because she discountenanced tobacco; and since she had a talent for making a man uncomfortably aware of her disapproval by certain wordless manifestations of scorn for his weaknesses, Ford also took to throwing ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Every street breeds creatures. They swarm gabbling, and walk like ants in the sun. Their faces are fierce and wary, with malevolent lips. Each mouths to each, and points and stares. On I walk, imperturbable and stark. But I know, oh, my boy, I know the alphabet of their vile whisperings and gapings and gesticulations. The air quivers with the flight of black winged shapes. Each foot-tap of that sure figure upon the granite is ticking his hour away." My uncle turned and took my hand. "And this, Edmond, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Christianity the Latin alphabet, from which our modern English alphabet is derived, took the place of the runic characters, which bore some resemblance to Greek, and English literature began with the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the printed page, for example—does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... 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. Conversation is like lawn-tennis, and requires alacrity in return at least as much as vigour in service. A happy phrase, an unexpected collocation of words, a habitual precision in the choice of terms, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Preface, that everybody may find his way, and I shall turn in future to it, and see that all transliterations in the book accord with it. I must ask for it therefore by return. You understand what we want. "A transliteration alphabet, for explaining the signs employed," would be a good precursor to yours and Lepsius' scientific work. We shall do well to employ in the text as ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... and myself are right in the conclusion that the figures are neither of the Runic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Lybian, Celtic, or any other alphabet-language, its ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... this, as the aged minister's prolonged meditations were the laughing-stock of the country, he being the clog on the wheels of the car of state. Instantly raps were heard in the spirit-cabinet, and, the alphabet being consulted, the ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Monte, plenty humble and prompt. 'What I urges is only to 'licit information. I still thinks, however, that onder the gen'ral wellfare clause of the constitootion, an' with an onfenced alphabet to pick an' choose from, a sport ought to have the inalienable right to spell things the way he likes. Otherwise, whatever is the use of callin' this a free country? If a gent's to be compelled to spell scenery with a fool "c," I asks you why was ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... "But she is a dear good girl; she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn't at all her line; she doesn't know the alphabet of that sort of thing. She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in Boston, with another sister of mine—the eldest of us—who married a Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... Assinaboins, of which tribe the Black Snake is (if living) a distinguished ornament, were visited more than a hundred years since by an English clergyman named Wolsey, who devised an alphabet for their use. The alphabet is still used by them, and they keep their memoranda on dressed skins. With the exception of the Cherokees, they are, perhaps, the only tribe possessing a written language. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... natural corruption of the pure Sanskrit word, it was changed by the old Persians into Chatrang; but the Arabs, who soon after took possession of their country, had neither the initial or final letter of that word in their alphabet, and consequently altered it further into Shatranj, which found its way presently into the modern Persian, and at length into the dialects of India, where the true derivation of the name is known only to the learned. Thus has a very significant word in the sacred language of the Brahmans been ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... 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 ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me, certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... seek, they will, of course, show special attention to those to whose good opinions they are indifferent, and whose good offices they can compel—that as they honor the literary and scientific, they must treat with high consideration those to whom they deny the alphabet—that as they are courteous to certain persons, they must be so to "property"—eager to anticipate the wishes of visitors, they cannot but gratify those of their vassals—jealous for the rights of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... bang, and pull, and tear to pieces—it develops creative power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet and the early pothooks, and the boy by and by combines them into literature. The apples and the peaches which he is taught to exchange justly are by and by transmuted into trade and commerce. He brings ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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
... unintentionally—the cause. He felt no resentment for his misguided assailant—he would willingly have exposed himself to a second attack, could he have thus restored her reason. The memento of the crucifixion—that Catholic alphabet, the crucifix—held up unto his soul the wondrous truth that God had voluntarily suffered, for the sake of man, all that humanity can endure; and the youth interiorly acknowledged that the errors of his life were but imperfectly balanced by the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... design the fount of type which, in the list of December, 1892, he named the Golden type, from The Golden Legend, which was to have been the first book printed with it. This fount consists of eighty-one designs, including stops, figures, and tied letters. The lower case alphabet was finished in a few months. The first letter having been cut in Great Primer size by Mr. Prince, was thought too large, and 'English' was the size resolved upon. By the middle of August, 1890, ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... few nephews, and two was his special favourites: this one and his brother, young Lawrence Champernowne. They were the sons of General Sir Arthur Champernowne, a famous fighter who'd got the Victoria Cross in India, and carried half the alphabet after ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... with all its follies, in that populous mart; and his exquisite sensibility to the beautiful and magnificent in nature, was abundantly ministered to by the surrounding country. We are told that he had been by some odd chance taught his alphabet, and his first lesson in "reading made easy," out of a black-letter Bible! That accident may have had its share in forming his taste for old-fashioned literature. But he was an attorney's clerk! The very name of a lawyer's office seems to suggest a writ of ejectment against all poetical influences ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... number of ciphers," Allen explained, when several copies had been made of the original. "The simplest is to change the letters of the alphabet about, using Z for A, and so on. Another simple one is to make figures stand for letters, as No. 1 is A, and so on. But those are so simple that only ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... were so many oracular statements, and he no more thought of questioning them than a child thinks of questioning its teacher about the names of the strange marks that constitute the alphabet. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... 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, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... secretary, and that he was convinced that the ex-President could write very little more than his signature. We had all heard the old story that after he had become of age his newly wedded wife had taught him the alphabet, but it was known to very few that he remained to the last so ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Catechism, which, in those days, had always an alphabet as janitor to the gates of its mysteries—who, with the catechism as a consequence even dimly foreboded, would even have learned it?—and showed Gibbie the letters, naming each several times, and going over them repeatedly. Then she gave him Donal's school-slate, with a sklet-pike, and said, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... itself of its confusion. Secondly, after having laid aside as useless many billions of earthly sounds, and after having fastened his murderous [5] attention upon one insulated tread, he has the power, still more unsearchable, of reading in that hasty movement an alphabet of new and infinite symbols; for, in order that the sound of the child's feet should be significant and intelligible, that sound must open into a gamut of infinite compass. The pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the phantoms of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... imposture on the simplicity of the public, 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, for a word[D] occurring in one ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Can they 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 ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... two of your own vocabulary, and similar lists for classes three and four. (To make a list for class one would be but a waste of time.) Procure if you can for this purpose a loose-leaf notebook, and in the several lists reserve a full page for each letter of the alphabet as used initially. Do not scamp the lists, though their proper preparation consume many days, many weeks. Try to make them really exhaustive. Their value will be in proportion to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... we to communicate? Did he by any chance suppose that I had learnt the finger alphabet? I touched my fingers and shook my head, as a means of dissipating ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... It may even have been that specific rumors of the signs, symbols, and hieroglyphics used in educational institutions had reached him in the obscurity of his cranberry meadows. At all events, when confronted by the alphabet chart, whose huge black capitals were intended to capture the wandering eyes of the infant class, Alcestis exhibited unusual, almost unnatural, excitement. "That is 'A,' my boy," said the teacher genially, ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... extent. At the base was abundant footing for two persons, Parson Brush and Nellie Dawson. The teacher had marked on the dark face of the rock with a species of chalk, all the letters large and small of the alphabet. They were well drawn, for the parson, like others in the settlement, was a man of education, though his many years of roughing it had greatly rusted his ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... tampered with, that, an hour or two after the conversation just narrated, Trevethick repaired to his strong-box, with the intention of taking from it the sum of money required by Solomon. The padlock was like a little clock, except that it had the letters of the alphabet round its face instead of figures, and three hands instead of two; this latter circumstance insured, by its complication, the safety of the treasure, but at the same time rendered it useless—unless he broke the box open—to ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... when she would walk twelve miles to be with him an hour, returning in time to go into the field at dawn. He had no chance to study, for he had no teacher, and the rules of the plantation forbade slaves to learn to read and write. But somehow, unnoticed by his master, he managed to learn the alphabet from scraps of paper and patent medicine almanacs, and no limits could then be placed to his career. He put to shame thousands of white boys. He fled from slavery at twenty-one, went North and worked as a stevedore in New York and New Bedford. At Nantucket he was given an opportunity ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... said Jeanie. "And you must show that you are in earnest, by trying to say your alphabet this evening. You missed out a great many of the letters yesterday, and ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... be accompanied by any letter of advice, and suspicion attached to Madame Derues, who hitherto had remained unnoticed. An inquiry as to where the packet had been posted soon revealed the office, distinguished by a letter of the alphabet, and the postmaster described a servant-maid who had brought the letter and paid for it. The description resembled the Derues' servant; and this girl, much alarmed, acknowledged, after a great deal of hesitation, that she had posted the letter in obedience to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... (Matt. 16:17). "Unto you it is given," he says on another occasion, "to know the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mark 4:11), and he adds that there are those who see and do not see; they are outside it; they have not the alphabet, we might say, that will open the book (cf. Rev. 5:3). He makes it clear at every point in the story of the Kingdom of God that there is more beyond; and he means it. It is to be a new beginning, an initiation, leading on to what we shall see but do not yet guess, though he gives ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... the negro from the jungle, from a slavery the most cruel known to human history, that it has taught him the use of tools, the science of agriculture, the worship of God, the first lessons in the alphabet of humanity. But unless we can now close this school, my friend, somebody is going to try to divide this Union ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Mother Hubbard Unknown The Death and Burial of Cock Robin Unknown 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. 1 (of 4) • Various
... light he went into their playroom, scattered with bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted. Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having been half cast aside. Gregory ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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
... every thing that was eccentric, and by no means a miser of my eccentricities; every one was welcome to a share of them, and I had plenty to spare after having freighted the company. Some sweetmeats easily bribed me home with him. I learned from poor Boyse my alphabet and my grammar, and the rudiments of the classics. He taught me all he could, and then sent me to the school at Middleton. In short, he made a man of me. I recollect it was about five and thirty years afterwards, when I had risen to some eminence at the bar, and when I ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... colours, and who had not a hood in her possession; taxes and subsidies, though they might press heavily on the rich, were no concern of hers, for she did not own a penny; while no want, however complete, of letters, books, and newspapers, distressed the mind of one who had never learned the alphabet. ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... Newton's self, to whom the world's in debt, Owed to School Mistress sage his Alphabet; But quickly wiser than his Teacher grown, Discover'd properties to her unknown; Of A plus B, or minus, learn'd the use, Known Quantities from unknown to educe; And made—no doubt to that old dame's surprise— The Christ-Cross-Row his Ladder to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was the natural sequence, in direct ratio to the use of the letters: "E: T: A: O: N: I: S: B: M, etc." The use of "E" was double that of any other. Yet on the pages of the book he found that the most frequently recurring symbol was "R" which was, ordinarily, one of the least used in the alphabet. "T," which would have been second in popularity, naturally, was seen only a few times in proportion. "Y," also seldom used, appeared very often. The symbol "A" was used ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... ago 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 metal plates which are struck with sticks, and I confess that this description ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... what 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 ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... The boy learned the alphabet quickly, and began to demand constant attention in his eagerness to learn. Mr. Mann found that he was giving more than the allotted time to him. To meet the case, he appointed from time to time members of the school "monitors," as he called them, to sit beside ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... jugglers. Nor do we need any longer to load our heads with the weight of learning, or pore {39} for years over arts and sciences, when a few months' practice with these pasteboard pages [takes the cards] can make any man's fortune, without his understanding a single letter of the alphabet, provided he can but slip the cards, snap his fingers, and utter the unintelligible jargon of 'presto, passa, largo, mento, cocolorum, yaw' like this Jonas. The moment he comes into company, and takes up a pack of cards, he begins, ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... 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 appear together in the evolution of culture, this stage of theism is consciously ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... services were almost the last diocesan act of Theulf, bishop of Worcester. One of the dedication ceremonies was quaint. As the bishop came to the middle of the nave, we are told that he found part of the pavement spread with white wood-ashes, upon which he wrote the alphabet twice with his pastoral staff—first the Greek alphabet from north-east to south-west, and then the Latin, from south-east to north-west, thus placing them in the form of a cross. He signified by this ceremony that all divine revelation was conveyed by the letters of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... 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 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... never been to school, and so she didn't even know the alphabet; but Genevieve sat down patiently to teach her, and found truly that much patience was necessary to accomplish the work she had undertaken. Hepsa would soon grow discouraged when she found so much to learn, and saw her ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and yellow ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 bare fact of sequence;[476] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... very obscure and is obviously corrupt. It contains the only Spanish word in the text of these hymns—obispo—a word including two letters, b and s, not in the Nahuatl alphabet. ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... or romances, even as early as the time of Mahomet, were so popular, that it required the most terrible denunciations of that legislator to proscribe them. Now, in the enunciation of the Arabs, the term Peri would sound Fairy, the letter p not occurring in the alphabet of that nation; and, as the chief intercourse of the early crusaders was with the Arabs, or Saracens, it is probable they would adopt the term according to their pronounciation. Neither will it be considered ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... just seen; 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
... the Cross Roads lead me out, And point to every corner of the sky, And say, "Thy feet shall follow in the trail Of every tribe; and thou shalt pitch thy tent Wherever thou shalt see a human face Which hath thereon the alphabet of life; Yea, thou shalt spell it out e'en as a child: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in that,' said I; 'we are at the 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
... of paper was found, folded up carefully, upon which something was written in the Russian language, as was supposed. The date 1778 was prefixed to it, and, in the body of the written note, there was a reference to the year 1776. Not learned enough to decypher the alphabet of the writer, his numerals marked sufficiently that others had preceded us in visiting this dreary part of the globe, who were united to us by other ties besides those of our common nature; and the hopes of soon meeting with some of the Russian traders could not but give a sensible ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... increase has been 3,563 souls. National pride, patriotism, and a spirit of independence, mark the Cherokee character." He further states, "the system of government is founded on republican principles, and secures the respect of the people." An alphabet has been invented by an Indian, named George Guess, the Cherokee Cadmus, and a printing press has been established at New Echota, the seat of government, where there is published weekly a paper entitled, "The Cherokee Phoenix,"—one half being in the English language, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... started to learn the alphabet in his boyhood, but could not grasp the joining of the syllables, and remained illiterate. He made up his mind to start reading anew, and asked the guard to bring him the Gospels. They were brought to him, and he ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... person whomsoever as commander. They all affixed their seals to this covenant; but some of them, to show their superior learning, put their initials, or what they used as such, for some of these learned Thebans knew only two or three letters of the alphabet, which they put down, though they happened not to be their real initials. An officer on the part of Sindhia, who was to have commanded these troops, was present at this reinstallation of the Begam, and glad ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... stored with knowledge and full of original power. Through reading, lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts had failed ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... 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 ellipsis ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... 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 already taught ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that every generation of men stands in this relation to its successors. It is as the schoolboy: the knowledge of which it is proudest will be as the alphabet to those who follow. It had better make no noise about its knowledge; a time will come when its utmost, in that kind, will be food for scorn. Poor fools! was that all they knew? and behold how proud they were! But what we see and feel will ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... necessity, made it their business to write down the compositions, and to keep fresh in their memory the very pronunciation of each word. Every poet had such a Rawiah. Of one Hammad it is said that he could recite one hundred Kasidahs rhyming on each letter of the alphabet, each Kasidah having at least one hundred verses. Abu Tammam (805), the author of the 'Hamasah,' is reported to have known by heart fourteen thousand pieces of the metre rajaz. It was not, however, until the end of the first century of the Hijrah that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... proceeded Grandfather, "our chair was bequeathed to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, a famous school-master in Boston. This old gentleman came from London in 1637, and had been teaching school ever since; so that there were now aged men, grandfathers like myself, to whom Master Cheever had taught their alphabet. He was a person of venerable aspect, and wore a ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... recognition of the one true God, which they recite daily, early and toward evening, and as to which they persuade themselves that it is the most efficacious safeguard against idolatry, fortified wherewith they can not lapse from true to false religion. The other secret alphabet consisted in this, that in inversed order they change the last letter [Hebrew: T] with the first [Hebrew: '], and this and another in turn, and so on through the rest, which inversion it is the custom ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... strange and difficult to decipher! Imagine a collection of nails variously arranged, and forming groups horizontally placed. What did these groups signify? Did they represent sounds and articulations, or, like the letters of our alphabet, complete words? Had they the ideographic value of Chinese written characters? What was the language hidden in them? These were the problems to be solved! It appeared probable that the inscriptions brought from Persepolis were written in the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Eh! Oh! Ah! Run through the alphabet in your wonderment. So it is, and so it will remain. Heaven ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... history have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well established results of life already lived. Though the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... 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, and gimmel ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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
... then begin to work on the vowels. They are the backbone of good singing. When they become controlled, they are then preceded by consonants. Take the first vowel, A; it can be preceded by all the consonants of the alphabet one after another, then each vowel in turn can be treated in the same way. We now have syllables; the next step is to use words. Here is where difficulties sometimes arise for the student. The word becomes perfectly easy to sing ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... and peculiar script, when all other European nations, save the Russian, have adopted the Roman, it is difficult to say, unless it be with them a matter of national pride. And they have been unnational in so many things! That the Russians should have their own alphabet is natural enough; they have sounds and letters and combinations—which neither the Germanic nor the Romanic group of languages possess. And yet both in Polish and Zechish, where the same sounds exist to a great extent, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... inches in diameter. PRANG'S CHROMOS will be given as premiums at publisher's prices. Send stamp for a catalogue. GAMES, &c.—For two new subscribers, we will give any one of the following: The Checkered Game Of Life, Alphabet and Building Blocks, Dissected Maps, &c. &c. For three new subscribers, any one of the following: Japanese Backgammon or Kakeba, Alphabet and Building Blocks (extra). Croquet, Chivalrie, and any other ...
— The Nursery, No. 109, January, 1876, Vol. XIX. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Unknown
... a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano—scales, played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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 precocious ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... it has passed; the sign of a business house now usually declares what is done or kept within, but formerly might be an object having no connection with the business, as "the sign of the trout;" the letters of the alphabet are signs of certain sounds. While a sign may be involuntary, and even unconscious, a signal is always voluntary, and is usually concerted; a ship may show signs of distress to the casual observer, but ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... 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, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... creation of form, and it is just in those cases in which the form is pure, and in which the creative current is momentarily interrupted, that there is a creation of matter. Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter into the composition of everything that has ever been written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up and come to join themselves to the others in order to make a new poem. But that the poet creates the poem and that human ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... letter of the alphabet?" repeated Russ. "Do you mean the letter I? That ought to be sleepy 'cause it's got ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... telephone Cicely talked and arranged and consulted with men and women to whom the joys of a good gallop or the love of a stricken fatherland were as letters in an unknown alphabet. ...
— When William Came • Saki
... 150 complete Alphabets, 30 Series of Numerals, Numerous Facsimiles of Ancient Dates. Selected and arranged by LEWIS F. DAY. Preceded by a short account of the Development of the Alphabet. With Modern Examples specially Designed by Walter Crane, Patten Wilson, A. Beresford Pite, the Author, and others. Crown 8vo, art linen. Price 3s. ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... and Mohammedans, so I try a mild joke on them, by pretending that they are a class and that I am teaching them a lesson. "A, B, C," I chant, and wait for them to repeat after me. They promptly take the lesson out of my hands and recite the entire English alphabet in chorus, winding up with shouts of "Goot mornin'! How you do?" and merry laughter. They are all pupils from the mission schools which have been established since the great Massacre of 1860, and which are helping, I hope, to make another ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... "The Bathos; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry;" where the humorous satirist discovers an analogy between flying-fishes, parrots, tortoises, &c., and certain writers, whose names are designated by initial letters. In this unlucky alphabet of dunces, not one of them but was applied to some writer of the day; and the loud clamours these excited could not be appeased by the simplicity of our poet's declaration, that the letters were placed at random: and while his oil could not smooth so turbulent a sea, every one swore to the flying-fish ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and, though all might show Biblical influence, they would not illustrate what we are trying to discover. So we come, without apology to the unnamed, to the twelve, without whom English literature would be different. This is the list in the order of the alphabet: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning (Mrs. Browning being grouped as one with him), Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Macaulay, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... V, VI, and XII of Book I should be reviewed at frequent intervals until their contents become as familiar as the alphabet. This result can be obtained only by time and persistency. Before it is reached, the average pupil will have learned and forgotten over and over again the material involved. These chapters may sometimes be reviewed ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... "You are courageous indeed, Hiss Elfrida. That is done by a woman who is invited, every where in her proper person, and knows 'tout Paris' like her alphabet I believe she holds stock in Raffini; anyway, they would double her pay rather than lose her. You would have more chance of ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... whether, as Professor Max Mueller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt, like the Professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as in some sense the voice and the arrows of an ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Gerbeaux, who 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 ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... the ordinary one-hand alphabet, the only one commonly used by deaf mutes, there are five others. One of these is the two-hand alphabet, sometimes used by hearing children at school. It is clumsy and inconvenient, however. A second is made by the arms alone. Still a third ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... depilator, and ran it quickly over his face. 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. ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... life. It is easier to become such a linguist as Sir William Jones was than to become a good Chinese scholar. You may count upon your fingers the Europeans whose industry and genius, even when stimulated by the most fervent religious zeal, has triumphed over the difficulties of a language without an alphabet. Here then is a country separated from us physically by half the globe, separated from us still more effectually by the barriers which the most jealous of all governments and the hardest of all languages oppose to the researches of strangers. Is it then reasonable ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... dismay of the accomplished corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and "reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she, too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet; and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 1767 wrote to Garrick of the French:—'Un mensonge grossier les revolte. Si on voulait leur persuader que les Anglais vivent de grenouilles, meurent de faim, que leurs femmes sont barbouillees, et jurent par toutes les lettres de l'alphabet, ils leveraient les epaules, et s'ecriraient, quel sot ose ecrire ces miseres-la? mais a Londres, diantre cela ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... old this hebdomadal consciousness was already borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept the word "Sunday," mysteriously boiled down to "Nunk," the first time her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the icy East River. There is an averted strangulation of a baby and for the second time in a Saltus opus a dying millionaire leaves his fortune to the St. Nicholas Hospital. Was Saltus ballyhooing for this institution? The hero is a modern Don Juan. Alphabet Jones appears occasionally, as he does in many of the other novels. This Balzacian trick obsessed the author for a time. The book is dedicated to John S. Rutherford and bears as a motto on its title ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the art of writing among the Romans was ascribed to Evander. The Roman alphabet was derived from the Greek, through the Grecian (Chalcidian) colony ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... look behind em' fur the wagin. Some said—I b'lieve 'twar Em'ry Keen an—they could read the names on the boards plain, 'twar so light, the moon bein' nigh the full: but Em'ry never read nuthin' at night by the moon in his life; he ain't enny too capable o' wrastlin' with the alphabet with a strong daytime on his book ter light him ter knowledge. An' the shadows war black an' still, an' all the yearth looked ez ef nuthin' lived nor ever would agin, an' they hearn a wolf howl. Waal, that disaccommodated the gals mightily, an' they hed a heap more interes' ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... infected afresh, so that the whole work may have to be done over again. I perceive a sort of shudder to run through a sheep farmer at the very name of this disease. There are no four letters in the alphabet which he appears so mortally to detest, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... beginning, the groundwork for 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,' 'agree' and 'see'. In the present instance we see it doubled no less than five times, although ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... was only in his eighth year when he left Kentucky, the little beginnings he had learned in the schools kept by Riney and Hazel in that State must have been very slight—probably only his alphabet, or possibly three or four pages of Webster's "Elementary Spelling Book." It is likely that the multiplication table was as yet an unfathomed mystery, and that he could not write or read more than the words he spelled. There is no record at what date he was able again to go to ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... notion that Splinter yelled in Greek when he was a baby. That is, if he ever was an infant, and called for his bottle in dactylic hexameter. Oh, I know lots about Greek, pop," laughed Will as his father smiled. "I know the alphabet and a whole lot of things even if ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... and ready 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
... Unfortunately, he now and then (in the Less-Read Poets) cuts down the extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of nobodies—Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the less-read would have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... find people to whom writing is so difficult that they prefer to sign their name with a mark, and beside them men who master systems of shorthand and improvise new systems of their own as easily as they learnt the alphabet. These contrasts are to be seen on all hands, and have nothing to do with variations in general intelligence, nor even in the specialized intelligence proper to the faculty in question: for example, no composer or dramatic poet has ever pretended to be able to perform all the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... gave only the values b and p to the human leg J and the mat Q. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped halfway, and admitted actual letters for the vowel sounds a, i, and u only. Their system remained a syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... over the fanlight," Steel went on. "And I came here by arrangement. And there was everything as I see it now. Bell, you must either cure me of this delusion, or you must prove logically to me that I have made a mistake. So far as I am concerned, I am like a child struggling with the alphabet." ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... N." (No. 26. p. 415.)—I do not think that "M. or N." are used as the initials of any particular words; they are the middle letters of the alphabet, and, at the time the Prayer Book was compiled, it seems to have been the fashion to employ them in the way in which we now use the first two. There are only two offices, the Catechism and the Solemnisation ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... all that wonderful west coast of our Island as well as he knew the fingers of his hand, and before long the ground all round the house was strewn about with smooth flat stones on which were scratched the letters of the alphabet, which presently, according to the pace of my studies indoors, began to arrange themselves into words, and so I was encompassed with learning, inside and out, as it were, and sucked it in whether I would ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... at the house, they were informed that the gentleman was come, and had been shown into the parlour. They found him sitting with a daughter of his friend's, about three years old, on his knee, whom he was teaching the alphabet from a horn book: at a little distance stood a sister of hers, some years older. "Get you away, miss," said he to this last; "you are a pert gossip, and I will have nothing to do with you."—"Nay," answered she, "Nancy ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... guttural sounds, or rude images of things seen; but 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
... the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, do they exist, will respond by a similar figure; and, a communication being thus once established, it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.' So spoke the German geometrician; but his project was never put into practice, and up to the present day there is no bond in existence between the Earth and her satellite. It is reserved for the practical ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... chapter, on self-confidence, and again lay its precepts to heart. Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules. It is not—or ought not to be—necessary for you to stop to think how to say the alphabet correctly, as a matter of fact it is slightly more difficult for you to repeat Z, Y, X than it is to say X, Y, Z—habit has established the order. Just so you must master the laws of efficiency in speaking until it ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Mackay came to speak with the King, he had to wait in this place before he could have audience of M'tesa. He would bring with him large sheets of paper on which he had printed in his workshop the alphabet and some sentences. The printing was actually done with the little hand-press that Mackay had used in his attic when he was a boy in his old home in Rhynie. He had taken it with him all the way to Uganda, and now was setting ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... projects of reform—some of them anonymous, and others from obscure individuals; some of them practical, and very many wildly fantastic. Even the grammarians showed their sympathy with the spirit of the time by proposing to expel summarily all redundant letters from the Russian alphabet! ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... have no relation to each other. You mistake the occasion for the cause, the means for the motive. Your alphabet is in fault. Such a set of vain, frivolous, dishonest, mean, hypocritical, and insufferably vulgar letters would be turned out of any respectable, well-bred spelling-book. Vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, meanness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... 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 arm and put him ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... written, the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work well. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... her a fine departure for Cape Greenville, the next point ahead. I saw the ugly boulders under the sloop's keel as she flashed over them, and I made a mental note of it that the letter M, for which the reef was named, was the thirteenth one in our alphabet, and that thirteen, as noted years before, was still my lucky number. The natives of Cape Greenville are notoriously bad, and I was advised to give them the go-by. Accordingly, from M Reef I steered outside of the adjacent islands, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
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