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More "Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion; ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... say that, 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... 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 gallery! I saw the other day in the village cemetery of Somerville, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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 bare fact ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... that his father's brushes were his alphabet. It may be true, though I doubt it, that his father's teaching was his only technical school. But if he was, as to the last he gloried in being, the child of the Old Period, he was much more truly the immediate pupil of the Van Eycks than of his father's irresolute ideals; ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... who cry "Plato! Plato!" are Platonists. So, not all those who now appeal to Lincoln's mighty name for sanction of their own petty caprices and crazy creeds, have learned the first letter of the alphabet which Lincoln used; but Roosevelt, I believe, knew Lincoln better, knew the spirit of Lincoln better, than any other President has known it. And Lincoln would have approved of most, if not of all, of the measures which, in that Ossawatomie speech, Roosevelt declared must be adopted. Whenever he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 occupied in ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... intend always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated class will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... with money, and she not as young as she had been; and how she compromised by always using the abbreviation, both in writing and speaking. "She always calls him H," said Grandma Cobb, "and I tell her sometimes it doesn't look quite respectful to speak to her husband as if he were part of the alphabet." Grandma Cobb, if the truth had been told, was always in a state of covert rebellion against ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... I give him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?"—(impossible to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs. Mangan's pronunciation of this word)—his hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry's room, and seating herself on ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... perfect method of writing prevailed among the Mayas of Yucatan and Central America. Their books were exceedingly neat, and strongly resembled an ordinary quarto volume, such as appears on European bookshelves. I have so lately discussed their manufacture, and the so-called alphabet in which they were written, and in a work of such easy access, that it is enough if I quote the conclusions there ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... time, there was a master and there was a maid. We will call the master by the first letter of the alphabet—Mr. A. And we will call the maid by ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... 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 the boards ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... collection of books, among which I found Shakespeare, and read it at every moment I could spare from my domestic duties. These occupied a great part of my time; besides, I had to shew (sew) my sampler, working the alphabet from A to Z, as well as the ten ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... prepare himself in good time to resist the passions, and he will be capable of checking the vehemence of the most furious. Let us assume that Augustus, about to give orders for putting to death Fabius Maximus, acts, as is his wont, upon the advice a philosopher had given him, to recite the Greek alphabet before doing anything in the first heat of his anger: this reflexion will be capable of saving the life of Fabius and the glory of Augustus. But without some fortunate reflexion, which one owes sometimes to a special divine mercy, or without some skill acquired beforehand, like that of Augustus, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... needless to Transcribe the Chinese Character, or to put their Alphabet into our Letters, because the Words would be both Unintelligible, and very hard to Pronounce; and therefore, to avoid hard Words, and Hyroglyphicks, I'll translate them ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... out his hands, he took the child from the mother's arms, kissed it full upon the lips, and added: "Men do not understand women, because men's minds have not been trained in the same school. When once a man has mastered the very alphabet of motherhood, then he shall have mastered the mind of woman; but I, at least, refuse to say that I do not understand, from the stand-point of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... discussed in this essay is translated from the so-called "Alphabet of Ben Sira," the edition used being Steinschneider's ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... in the doorways and on the pavement. There is a corner by the road crossing the main street which is the prettiest in east Surrey. Weatherbeaten, brick-and-timber cottages frame it: the Bell Inn, with its beams like letters of a big black alphabet, hangs out its gold bell; beyond, the road slopes to dim country greennesses and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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 secure whatever ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... given us two books—the book of all living beings, or Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning when all things were created, for each living being is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters ... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... little books, made of this writing-paper, and filled with rude drawings, and with strange and apparently illegible characters, which, however, were at once seen to be the child's work. Upon closer inspection, the characters were found to consist of the printed alphabet; some of the letters being formed backwards, some sideways, and there being no spaces between the words. These writings were deciphered, not without much difficulty; and it then appeared that they consisted of regular verses, generally in explanation of a rude ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... use of a parlour, ever appear to come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes' walk of the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the number of times they are asked to do it and don't. It really seems,' said Tom, relinquishing the paper with ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... story of the sampler, and so the teaching and practice of the canvas went constantly forward. The method was so simple, quite within the capacity of an alphabet-studying child. To make an A in cross-stitch was to create a link between the baby mind and the letter represented. There was no choice, no judgment or experience needed. The limit of every stitch was fixed by a cross thread, ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... batch of large good-natured looking policemen, whose function I cannot explain, but it was agreeable to see them again. There was no order or organisation of any kind to protect and annoy you. The authorities had thoughtfully painted the letters of the alphabet on the platform where the luggage was deposited, and you were supposed to find your own trunks in front of your own letter. I, full of German ideas still, waited a weary time near my letter. "You'll never get them ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... returned the other, "that it's a kind of universal spelling-book amongst us, and so it is—an alphabet aisily larned. Your health, now and under all circumstances! Teddy, or Thaddeus, I drink to your symmetry and inexplicable proportions; and I say for your comfort, my worthy distillator, that if you are not so refulgent in beauty as Venus, you are ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these I was never ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 their ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 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, ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... The Chinese alphabet was never intended to represent the sound of words. It was in its origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No word ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S,—Swubble, I named him. This was a T,—Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... command has gone forth over all the beauty and over all the art of the present world, crowded for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To the nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side. "Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and "types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Mr. Orvel Bissell 'Mas' today; I raised him but I still call him Mas. Orvel. My young Missus was the one who taught me; she kept a school for us; we took it for a play school; when I was a little boy I knew the alphabet. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... 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, and remarked ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... communicated to all the company except Mr. Crabtree, who suffered by his loss of hearing, that cynic was soon after accosted by a lady, who, by means of an artificial alphabet, formed by a certain conjunction and disposition of the fingers, asked if he had heard any extraordinary news of late. Cadwallader, with his usual complaisance, replied, that he supposed she took him for a courier or spy, by teasing ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... colt-breaking. Gradually, as I watched him that night, the truth dawned on me: the man was trying to teach himself to read. The "Cardinal's Snuff-box"! and the only clue to the mystery, a fair knowledge of the alphabet learned away in a childish past. In truth, it takes a deal to "beat the Scots," or, what is even better, to make them ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... wouldn't believe that Hilary was doing his duty by them, though I assured him that he read them all the 'Ancient Mariner' yesterday morning while they watched him dress, and that I was teaching them the alphabet whenever I had a spare minute. But nothing would satisfy him; and off the two eldest must go to the Catholic school next week to be destroyed by the fog and to pick up with all ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... sputters of dots may, with a good lens, be discerned to proceed from this alphabet, and to stop at various points, or lose themselves in the texture, of the represented wood. And, knowing now something of the matter beforehand, guessing a little more, and gleaning the rest with my ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... eternity and omnipotence. He 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 ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... bits of knowledge all we gained from those soldier friends. They taught us the alphabet, how to spell easy words, and then to form letters with pencil. They explained the meaning of fife and drum calls which we heard during the day, and in mischievous earnestness, declared that they, the best fighters of Colonel Stephenson's ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... 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
... vivid dreams, in which they recall the impressions of their earliest infancy. So was it with the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock; and so also was it with Laura Bridgman, and it is a very interesting fact that she, being unable to speak, when asleep used the finger alphabet. This she did sometimes in a very confused manner, the irregularity of her finger-signs corresponding with that defective articulation which persons give utterance to, when they murmur and mutter indistinctly their dream-impressions. It was, be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... to talk to, and then by his watching the forefinger of the writer, if across the room, or if near enough, by placing the hand of the writer carelessly on the shoulder of the party we desired to communicate with, the communication was written out in the telegraph alphabet or by taking hold of his hand and writing upon ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... nor Mrs. Coomber ever forgot that day. A new element was introduced into the lives of the fisherman's family. The little girl learned her first lesson in self-control, and Dick and Tom began to master the difficulties of the alphabet; for, when the net was finished, and Bob and his father waded out into the sea on their shrimping expedition, Tiny ran and fetched her pretty picture to show the boys, and then they all set to work with bits of stick to make the ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... into a sitting position, and with signs and gestures we endeavoured to explain what we wanted him to do. Neither of us understood the deaf and dumb alphabet, but the alphabet was hardly necessary. With much pantomimic action we described Leith, the Professor, and the two girls, and Kaipi enjoyed himself immensely by waving his knife in front of One Eye's face to ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... the premises, and at the angles formed with them by the slanting or by the perpendicular lines the middle term occurs. The schema of Figure IV. resembles Z, the last letter of the alphabet: this helps one to remember it in contrast with Figure I., which is thereby also remembered. Figures II. and III. seem ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... it prudent to side with the latter, and therefore, doubtless, considered it wise to suppress all evidence of Reuchlin's influence upon his beliefs. All the other editions of the Margarita in my possession are content with teaching, under the head of the Alphabet, that the Hebrew letters were invented by Adam. On Luther's view of the words "God said," see Farrar, Language and Languages. For a most valuable statement regarding the clashing opinions at the Reformation, see Max Muller, as above, lecture iv, p. 132. For ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... religious orders are able to master the native languages with so little difficulty that "it seems a gift from heaven." Chirino gives some account of these, illustrated with specimens of three—Tagalan, Harayan, and Visayan—with the alphabet used by the Filipinos. He also praises the politeness, in word and act, of the Tagalos, and gives them credit for much musical ability. A chapter is assigned to the native alphabet and mode of writing. All, women as well as men, write and read; and they have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... day the 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 a ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... very few words of the children's language, and Kalliope, who acted as assistant mistress, did not know much English. But the laws of arithmetic, so the Queen felt, must be of universal application, two and two making four, by whatever names you called them. And the Alphabet must be a useful thing to learn whatever words you spell with it afterwards. So the Queen drew Arabic numerals on large sheets of paper and tried to impress on a giggling group of children that the figures corresponded in some way to little piles of pebbles which she ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... succeeded so well that before the "Sully" reached New York he had conceived "not merely the idea of an electric telegraph, but of an electro-magnetic and chemical recording telegraph, substantially and essentially as it now exists," and had invented an alphabet of signs, the same in all important respects as that now in use. "The testimony to the paternity of the idea in Morse's mind, and to his acts and drawings on board the ship, is ample. His own testimony is corroborated ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... work of Cyril and Methodius was not directly concerned with the Bulgarian conversion. In Pannonia and Moravia and Croatia they were the great missionaries to the Slavs. Cyril invented a Slavonic alphabet, and was able to preach to the Slavs everywhere in their own tongue; and in Serbia a flourishing Church sprang {125} up which retained the Slavonic rite. Early in the tenth century many Slavonian priests were ordained by the Bishop of Nona, himself a Slav ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the Middle Ages, which formed the basis of the legal system of the mediaeval Church, and which has largely influenced modern practice; the development of a language from which many modern tongues have been derived, and which has modified all western languages; and the perfection of an alphabet which has become the common property of all nations whose civilization has been derived from the Greek and Roman—these constitute the chief contributions of Rome ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... never applied himself to the study of letters, [Greek: grammata mathein], fearing the danger of falling into had company at school, he seems to mean only Greek letters, then the language of all the learned; for he must have learned at home the Egyptian alphabet. In the same manner we are to understand Evagrius and others, who relate, that a certain philosopher expressing his surprise how St. Antony could employ his time, being deprived of the pleasure of reading, the saint told him that the universe was his book. (Socr. l. 4, c. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... arm and led him to a carriage in waiting. Then he took him to Pine street, and introduced him, in the most deferential manner, to the broker who held half of New York at his disposal, and knew the city as he knew his alphabet. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... second letter of the alphabet. It is called a vocal labial consonant, which, no doubt, serves it ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... three distinct types of rays named after the first three letters of the Greek alphabet—Alpha, Beta, Gamma—besides a gas emanation as does thorium which is a powerfully radio-active substance. The Alpha rays constitute ninety-nine per cent, of all the rays and consist of positively ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... a 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, and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Stars, the Earth, the Trees, the Winds, the universal voice of Nature, tempest, and avalanche, the Sea's roar and the grave voice of the waterfall, the hoarse thunder and the low whisper of the brook, the song of birds, the voice of love, the speech of men, all are the alphabet in which it communicates itself to men, and informs them of the will and law of God, the Soul of the Universe. And thus most truly did "THE WORD BECOME ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... third letter of the alphabet. It is also used in music, especially by prima donnas who try to reach it ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... 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
... blind man with a knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me his method, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... part of the body. By prefixing different letters of the alphabet I may be changed into a fruit, a period of time, an animal, a term of affection, wearing apparel, a sign of emotion, anxiety, or verbs signifying to approach, to attend, to raise up, to wither, and to waste gradually. What am I? and what are ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... numbers are to be thrown or hit. Why? Because you must turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I should choose the five. If Biberli did not put ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... be in need of nothing. Well, this, too, is indeed a sure sign that they despise both their office and the souls of the people, yea, even God and His Word. They do not have to fall, they are already fallen all too horribly, they would need to become children, and begin to learn their alphabet, which they imagine that they ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... eyes. Now 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 ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's Hospital, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... with Eriksen! He understands the deaf-and-dumb alphabet!" they shouted. The stranger shrugged his ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... in writing sentences, since it was not always possible to get a consistent answer to the question as to what part of a sentence constitutes a single word, and time was too limited for any extensive language study. The following alphabet has been ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... 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: And therein ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has declared his intention to become a circus-rider, and Talbot, who has not so soaring an ambition, has resolved to be a policeman, it is likely the world will hear of them before long. In the mean time, and with a view to the severe duties of the professions selected, they are learning the alphabet, Charley vaulting over the hard letters with an agility which promises well for his career as circus-rider, and Talbot collaring the slippery S's and pursuing the suspicious X Y Z's with the promptness and boldness of ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... which it shone and disappeared, he came to the conclusion that it was caused by signallers endeavouring to open communications. The flashes were watched, and were found to be in accordance with the Morse alphabet; and the joyful news was spread that their friends ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... Niebuhr, Grotefend, and Lassen, had made some guesses at the meaning of the cuneiform letters; but Major Rawlinson of the East India Company's service, after years of labor, has at last accomplished the glorious achievement of fully revealing the alphabet and the grammar of this long unknown tongue. He has, in particular, fully deciphered and expounded the inscription on the sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media. These records of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... temperaments—the bile, the atrabile, phlegm, and blood—are represented in the Arabian system of physics by the four elements, which are considered to be connected with them; the figures refer to the numerical power of the abjad, or alphabet; and the enigma itself has been attributed, though on uncertain grounds, to Ali, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... there seemed to be a spark of almost extinguished fire feebly glimmering in the bottom of his soul; and as the squire hinted at a sly story of the parson and a pretty milkmaid whom they once met on the banks of the Isis, the old gentleman made an "alphabet of faces," which, as far as I could decipher his physiognomy, I verily believe was indicative of laughter; indeed, I have rarely met with an old gentleman that took absolute offence at the imputed gallantries of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... 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 of all letters, thou comest to testify against Israel in the time ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... 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 proof they ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... learne thy thought: In thy 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
... 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 ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the opening 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 is a second ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... chemical combinations, and thus collected upward of 8000 different crystals of various chemical combinations, discovering several hundred different substances which would fluoresce to the X-ray. So far little had come of X-ray work, but it added another letter to the scientific alphabet. I don't know any thing about radium, and I have lots of company." The Electrical Engineer of June 3, 1896, contains a photograph of Mr. Edison taken by the light of one of his fluorescent lamps. The same ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... is, or what the job, he finds something of interest because he goes upon the theory that every minute is meant to be lived. Maroon him at a cross-roads, with five hours until train time, and he'd have the operator's first name in ten minutes and be learning the Morse alphabet, after which he would rush up to his new friend's house to see the babies or to pass judgment on a Holstein calf or ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... 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 to make it excite ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... where they will be taught cooking, dress-making, laundry work, house-keeping economy, and for those who wish it, office work. It will require some training even to pronounce the name of this new institution, which requires something more than the number of letters in the alphabet to spell it, for it has this ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Latin Grammar till we knew every word of it by heart, but we did scarcely any retranslation from English into Latin. Much of our time was wasted on the merest trifles, such as learning to write, for example, like copperplate, and, still more extraordinary, in copying the letters of the alphabet as they are ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... deeper and deeper, and his liking and respect for his young subordinate increased rapidly. Finally the ranger was given his first lesson in radio-telegraphy. While Lew was writing down for him the wireless alphabet, Charley was showing him how to make the letters on the spark-gap. Before they turned in for the night, the ranger had learned to distinguish the difference between the sound of a dot and of a dash as the signals buzzed in ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... no longing was ever more firmly planted in the human heart, than that of discovering some short cut to the high road of mental acquirement. The toilsome learner's "Progress" through the barren outset of the alphabet; the slough of despond of seven syllables, endangered as they both are by the frequent appearance of the compulsive birch of the Mr. Worldly-wisemen who teach the young idea how to shoot, must ever be looked upon as a probation, the power of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... it wasn't a Z; then she tried a Y; then an X; then a W, and went so backwards through almost the whole alphabet. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but his literary acquirements were of a very low order, for upon becoming prime minister he could neither read nor write. Finding great inconvenience from his incapacity in these respects, he applied himself diligently to his alphabet, and was soon able to carry on all official correspondence of any importance to himself. The whole of the political, fiscal, and judicial communications are submitted to him, and the departments controlled ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... 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, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... together with the Benedicite, Gratias, Ave Maria, Psalms, and other matter, were taught also in the Latin schools, where probably Luther, too, learned them. In the Instruction for Visitors, Melanchthon still mentions "der Kinder Handbuechlein, darin das Alphabet, Vaterunser, Glaub' und andere Gebet' innen stehen—Manual for Children, containing the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and other prayers," as the first schoolbook. (W. 26, 237.) After the invention of printing, chart-impressions with pictures illustrating the Creed, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... 43., and No. 7. p. 104.)—I beg to state my own mode, than which I know of none better. I have several books, viz., for History, Topography, Personal and Family History, Ecclesiastical Affairs, Heraldry, Adversaria. At the end of each volume is an alphabet, with six columns, one for each vowel; in one or other of which the word is entered according to the vowel which first appears in it, with a reference to the page. Thus, bray would come under B.a; church under C.u.; and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... always look at these sort of things from every point of view. Start with a conviction of the man's guilt, and you'll go hunting up evidence to bolster that conviction. My plan is to begin at the beginning; learn the alphabet of the case, and work up ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... It will seem pale as compared with that of Hanover of last year; but I want to be present at it, considering my unvarying interest in the work undertaken by the late Brendel and bravely continued by Riedel and Gille. After having said A, and even B and C, I ought to go through the whole alphabet. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... death. Nevertheless, he belonged in a manner to the inner circle of the "Punch set," and frequented the taverns that were their clubs; and he even went in double harness with Mark Lemon as co-editor, vice "Alphabet" Bayley, of "The Bude Light"—an English imitation of "Les Guepes." He was, in fact, a man of some celebrity who had already gained public reputation beyond the band of men, brilliant, no doubt, but, for the most ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 leaves ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... listened with eagerness to the stories which Sister Frances read, or watched with interest the progress of her work; soon she longed to imitate what she saw done with so much pleasure, and begged to be taught to work and read. By degrees she learned her alphabet, and could soon, to the amazement of her schoolfellows, read the names of all the animals in Sister Frances' picture-book. No matter how trifling the thing done, or the knowledge acquired, a great point is gained by giving the desire for employment. Children frequently become industrious ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... time scarcely sufficient to give them a relish for learning, and far inadequate to wide and profound researches. As soon as a young man has closed this period of study, and while he is at the beginning of the alphabet of science, he must betake himself to a profession, he must hurry through a few books,—which, by the way, are rarely original works, but compilations and abridgments,—and then must enter upon practice, and get ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... four psalters. The framer of the catalogue then passes to the opposite end of the room, and, beginning with the top shelf (suprema theca opposita), enumerates 37 volumes. Next, he deals with the rest of the books, which, he tells us, were in other shelves, marked with the letters of the alphabet (in aliis thecis distinctis per alphabetum). If I understand the catalogue correctly, there were eleven of these divisions, each containing an average of about 25 volumes. The total number of volumes in ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... are not of the antiquity which generally renders the few specimens we have of alphabet bells so peculiarly interesting, but probably they were copied from the bells in the more ancient tower. No. 3. has in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... pronunciation, the Protestants gave countenance to the new. Gardiner employed the authority of the king and council to suppress innovations in this particular, and to preserve the corrupt sound of the Greek alphabet. So little liberty was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... which had evidently been plucked from a tea-plant in China, since the forms and figures were all suggested by the flowery kingdom. The lids of the vessels were shaped like tea-leaves; and miniature China men and women picked their way about among the letters of the Chinese alphabet, as if they were playing at word-puzzles. Nicholas admired the service to its owner's content, establishing thus a new bond of sympathy between them; and both were soon seated near the table, sipping the tea with demure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... European children so far as they have been tried, but they have not been put to abstract reasoning. Their perceptive powers are large, as they are much exercised in procuring food, etc. Anything requiring perception only is readily mastered, the alphabet will be known in a few lessons; figures are soon recognised, and the quantities they represent, but addition from figures alone always presents difficulties for a while, but in a little ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their venerable age enclosed me comfortably. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... notes, which arrived in an ordinary stamped envelope, should not 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... it isn't easy to be kind," she answered, "when you don't stand for much else in the universe but a letter of the alphabet." She turned back to her grate and commenced sweeping ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 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 page this quotation from Rabusson: "Pourquoi la mort? ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... these ovens and with sweet dough to bake in them. For five cents the boys and girls can get the use of an oven, and dough enough to bake little cakes. They often make cakes shaped like animals. The peddler makes the letters of the alphabet in dough. Then he bakes them in the oven for the boys and girls. With these cake letters they often learn ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... be the most difficult language to learn in our day; but the ancient cuneiform was certainly quite as complicated as Chinese. The cuneiform had no real alphabet, only 'signs.' There were five hundred simple signs, and nearly as many compound signs, so that the student had to begin with a thousand different signs to memorize. Yes, boys had their ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... in her face, "I am glad to see you Billy wants you sadly for he has learned his lesson." Then out came the little boy. "How do, Doody Two-Shoes," says he, not able to speak plain. Yet this little boy had learned all his letters; for she threw down this alphabet mixed together thus: ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... idle, careless little Prince; 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 ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... Welland called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and the Dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... for?—to humour the arrogance of the proud,—to pamper the appetite of the full,—to tighten the grip of the iron hand of power;—and though it be sometimes for better ends, yet the soldier cannot choose what letters of the alphabet of obedience he will learn. Politics was the very shaking of the government sieve, where if there were any solid result it was accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub,—a mere conglomeration of bubbles,—as ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... gayly responded, "what's spellin', anyway? Just alphabet lettuhs fixed like some man chose to fix 'em befo' you an' me were bawn. An' so I say such a man's had his notions more'n long enough, and it's high time we-all took a whirl at ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... had 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, ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... proceeded Grandfather, "our chair was bequeathed to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, a famous schoolmaster 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 ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... dear sir, credit is the first letter in the alphabet of contemporary finance. Send some ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... no reflection upon your abilities," she explained, hurriedly. "I know all that you have done in London and in Edinburgh, and these German places. You can tack more than half the letters of the alphabet after your name if you choose to. But I don't quite see what you are doing in ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... 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 ...
— Statesman • Plato
... ground up in the school-teaching machine than in any other way. Go on! The girl who taught me my alphabet in the little red school-house in Harrison County earned her salary, I can tell you. She was seventeen ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... them. Fools! are there no words made of letters that would sound as well as Charles Stewart, with that magic title beside them? Why, the word King is like a lighted lamp, that throws the same bright gilding upon any combination of the alphabet, and yet you must shed your blood for a name! But thou, for thy part, shalt have no wrong from me. Here is an order, well warranted, to clear the Lodge at Woodstock, and abandon it to thy master's keeping, or those whom he shall appoint. He will have ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... several 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... answer is, Don't we all change as we grow to know one another? What were just features, what just dingily represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn't it surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real wonderful things—or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... hands set to and quickly cleared away the tea-things, and the ladies and their good brother brought out the spelling and copy books and slates, &c., and commenced with their new and green pupils. We had, by stratagem, learned the alphabet while in slavery, but not the writing characters; and, as we had been such a time learning so little, we at first felt that it was a waste of time for any one at our ages to undertake to learn to read and write. But, as the ladies were so anxious that we should learn, and so willing to ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... symbolic wisdom cannot be acquired, without much studious application, how preposterous would it be to place, among its disciples, one who had lived to adult years, without having known the necessity or felt the ambition for a knowledge of the alphabet of his mother tongue? Such a man could make no advancement in the art of Masonry; and while he would confer no substantial advantage on the institution, he would, by his manifest incapacity and ignorance, detract, in the eyes of strangers, from ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... each circle of the alphabet absolutely blocks the preceding one, but, when the entire deal is complete, the removal of cards from the alphabet releases those on the circles beneath, which ...
— Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience - New Revised Edition, including American Games • Adelaide Cadogan
... Congress by the President on April 3, 1798. In the original the names of the French officials concerned were written at full length in the Department cipher. In making a copy for Congress, Secretary Pickering substituted for the names the terminal letters of the alphabet, and hence the report has passed into history ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... incomprehensible. Consider the possibilities of combination also of the enormously varied disclosures of patents. Calculations of the possible combinations and permutations of a small number of objects are familiar. Different combinations of the letters of the alphabet are sufficient to record the sum of human knowledge in many languages. With substantially two octaves of the diatonic scale the world's melodies have been sounded, nor do any doubt that our successors will thrill to airs that we have never heard. ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... 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 of its function ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... stock), yet, in the way of encroachment, from the influence, both political and religious, acquired by its immediate neighbours, the Batta tongue appears to have experienced less change than any other. For a specimen of its words, its alphabet, and the rules by which the sound of its letters is modified and governed, the reader is referred to the Table and Plate above. It is remarkable that the proportion of the people who are able to read and write is much greater than of those who do not; a qualification seldom observed in such uncivilized ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... flew over the road and the hills, and Pellicanus cried: "Look there! They always fly in two straight lines, and form a letter of the alphabet. This time it is an A. Can you see it? When the Lord was writing the laws on the tablets, a flock of wild geese flew across Mt. Sinai, and in doing so, one effaced a letter with its wing. Since that time, they always ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... little bare hill back of the camp, and two of the other fellows were to hike over to another about a mile or so away. Then they would exchange sentences by means of the signal flag, waved up and down and every which way, according to the alphabet used in the U. S. Signal Corps. And to-night the result was to be ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... and again because I utterly and totally distrusted the methods which, up to this time, have been applied by BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG and others who start, and must start, from the misleading and unlucky alphabet handed down by LANDA. I believe that legacy to have been a positive misfortune, and I believe any process of the kind attempted by BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG (for example, in his essay on the MS. Troano) ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... benefit. And there were the tests—horse-power, gun-ranges, resistance, and I don't know what all; technical junk that I savvied about as much as if he'd been tryin' to show me how to play the Chinese alphabet on a piccolo. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... dar not presume to sette my book ne ioyne hit to his, for dyuerse causes". Accordingly he begins his "Liber ultimus" with a new signature, preceded by a blank page. His "table" nevertheless is combined with that of the preceding seven books in one alphabet. Wynkyn de Worde's edition has a more elaborate index of ninety pages in which each of the eight books is indexed in a ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... 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 in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... written. But another is, that the human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it could ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... understood to have charged himself with the duty of collecting and arranging the manuscripts which had survived the desolation inflicted upon his country by the arms of Assyria, at the same time substituting for the more ancient characters usually known as the Samaritan the Chaldean alphabet, to which his followers had now become accustomed. From these notices, however, which respect a later period, we return to the more primitive times immediately succeeding the era ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... 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
... was much marvelled at. I had been known as a good swimmer; but that was not extraordinary in a place where swimming and cliff climbing were learnt before the alphabet. What was wondered at was that I had managed to keep afloat and swim so far when all the men had perished. When it was whispered about, therefore, that I was in possession of a magic stone which had the power of protecting me from the dangers of the deep, the credulous ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... invested only a few centavos, but took away a choice collection of bright colors and of mingled fragrance. Here was an ardent lover, all eagerness, who would write his words of devotion to his idol in the alphabet of angels. Now and then an American tourist was seen to carry away an armful of bouquets to bestow with impartial hand among his lady friends. Looking on at the suggestive scene is a scantily-clad Indian girl, with a curious hungry expression upon her face. Is it flowers or food that ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... meaning by the letters of the alphabet, Protarchus, which you were made to learn as ...
— Philebus • Plato
... Then my 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 of all letters, thou comest to testify against ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... D current, and the C D current. Whichever current is used, it may always be known which of the two posts employed is the positive and which the negative, by observing the letters stamped upon their tops. The one whose letter comes first in the order of the alphabet is positive; the other is negative. Also, the one standing towards the left hand is positive, and that at the right hand is negative. The qualities of the several currents are stated in a descriptive paper on the inside of the lid of the machine, which ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... passages in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to indoctrinate him according to his capacity, and to spare nothing to that end.' He, accordingly, put Pantagruel under a great teacher, who began by bringing him up after the fashion of those times. He taught him his charte (alphabet) to such purpose that he could say it by heart backwards, and he was five years and three months about it. Then he read with him Donotus and Facetus (old elementary works on Latin grammar), and he was thirteen years, six months, and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 bare fact of sequence;[476] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... which completed the alphabet (making seventeen of this part of the work) were delivered to the subscribers. As a precautionary measure, those for foreign countries were sent out first, then those for the provinces, and lastly those for Paris. The eleven volumes of plates were not published ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... manuscript of Diego de Landa—Second Bishop of Yucatan, in 1573,—which was discovered and published by M. de Bourbourg. It contains an account of the manners and customs of the Maya Indians, a description of some of their chief towns; and more important than all besides, it furnishes an alphabet, which is the most probable key that is known to us for reading the hieroglyphics which are found upon many of the Yucatan ruins. The alphabet, though imperfect in itself, may at some future time explain, ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... Allan's been traipsing this land since two years before you were born, and that is more than twenty years ago. There's not a hill, or valley, or river he don't know like a school kid knows its alphabet. Not an inch of this devil's playground for nigh a range of three hundred miles. There isn't a trouble on the trail he's not been up against, and beat every time. And now—why, now he's got a right outfit with him, same as always, you're worrying. Say, there's only one thing ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... new atmosphere—a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their heads: and no time for a word more about anything except you: you, and double-you,—and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne: ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... nailed-up rose trees, and twisting creepers. After I had made a habit, till it became a passion, of seeking decorative motives, strange and novel curves—in short, began to detect the transcendent alphabet or written language of beauty and mystery in every plant whatever (of which the alphabet may be found in the works of Hulme), I found in every growth of every kind, yes, in every weed, enough to fill my soul ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... with this boy, sir," said he, red as fire; "he denies the first letter in the alphabet, and insists upon it that the letter A is ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... identify him with the individual referred to. Paul doubtless pointed out the pope particularly as the "man of sin," "the son of perdition" (2 Thess. 2:3). In former ages, before the modern system of notation was introduced, the only method of denoting numbers was by employing the letters of the alphabet, certain letters having the power of number as well as of sound. We still employ the same system for certain purposes. The number of a name was simply the number denoted by the ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... speaker has of his language is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... yet dared to look at him. But her little hand lay unreprovingly in his,—nestling like a timid bird which loved to be there, and sought not to escape. He pressed it gently to his heart; he felt by its magnetic touch, by that dumb alphabet of love, more eloquent than spoken words, that he had won the heart ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... down the alphabet. The list is short for several good reasons, one being that it is well to give other lists from season to season. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a botanist or scientific gardener, but we convey the information, such as it is, to our fellow citizens, and they use it. In ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... Trechsel. After the 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, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... their alphabet. They knew it and they did not know it. What they knew was not very much. Ruster grew eager; he lifted the little boys up, each on one of his knees, and began to teach them. Liljekrona's wife went out and in and listened quite in amazement. It sounded like a ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... the office a blind man with a knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me his method, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... was found, for instance, at Vaison in the Vocontian canton an inscription written in the Celtic language with the ordinary Greek alphabet. It runs thus: —segouaros ouilloneos tooutious namausatis eiorou beileisamisosin nemeiton—. The last word ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... rendered by Gaubil mentions, as characters used in their Empire, the Uighur, the Persian and Arabic, that of the Lamas (Tibetan), that of the Niuche, introduced by the Kin Dynasty, the Khitan, and the Bashpah character, a syllabic alphabet arranged, on the basis of the Tibetan and Sanskrit letters chiefly, by a learned chief Lama so-called, under the orders of Kublai, and established by edict in 1269 as the official character. Coins bearing this character, and dating from 1308 to 1354, are extant. The forms of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... You like syllables of sound in unmeaning rotation, and you despise its words, its purposes, its narrative feats; carry out your principle, it will show you where you are. Buy a dirty palette for a picture, and dream the alphabet ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... 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 their common work ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... 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 of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to tint the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as a b, a c, Fig. 3, and then scratch in their shapes ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... patch Bow-wow-wow Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall The Queen of Hearts Naughty Willey Bell The queen of hearts To market, to market, a gallop, a trot The North Wind doth blow When I was a little boy, my mother kept me in Mary had a pretty bird Miss Jane had a bag, and a mouse was in it MAJA'S ALPHABET ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... and more nonsense than ever any man did of both! All I have yet learned from this work is, that one should have a tutor for one's son to teach him to have no ideas, in order that he may begin to learn his alphabet as he ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... senate. In the form of public and official dispatches, he made also some useful innovations; and it may be mentioned, for the curiosity of the incident, that the cipher which he used in his correspondence, was the following very simple one:—For every letter of the alphabet he substituted that which stood fourth removed from it in the order of succession. Thus, for A, he used D; for ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... lucky 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 proof they ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... species of literature—if it must be so designated—that we gather the real genius, or mental character of the ordinary classes of society. I do assure you that some of these chap publications are singularly droll and curious. Even the very rudiments of learning, or the mere alphabet-book, meets the eye in a very imposing manner—as in the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... distinctly that when I did go to school we used the proverbial Webster's blue-back speller. The majority of the pupils began with the "A, B, C," the alphabet, and went as far as "horseback," while apt pupils might be able to reach "compressibility." And so for years we went from "A" ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... which struck me most: the eternal and all-seeing eye placed over the door; Fortune's wheel too, composed of six figures curiously disposed, and not unlike our man alphabet, two mounting, two sitting, and two tumbling, over against it: on the outside of ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... are not synonyms, though often used as such. Character means the sum of distinguishing qualities. "Actions, looks, words, steps, form the alphabet by which you may spell characters."—Lavater. Reputation means the estimation in which one is held. One's reputation, then, is what is thought of one's character; consequently, one may have a good reputation and a bad character, or a good character and a bad reputation. Calumny may injure ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... wolf was put to school, to endeavour, by instruction, to correct his natural propensity to voracity. His master, in order to teach him to read, transcribed, in large characters, some letters of the alphabet, and attempted to make him understand these signs. But instead of reading K L S, as it was written, the savage animal read fluently Kid, Lamb, Sheep. He was governed by instinct, and his nature was incorrigible. The son of a robber is in the very same situation: vice is coeval with his existence. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... light, could not be long without being shaken, first in the human mind and 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
... boy that'd work with him. I'd noticed this little starved Mexican kid hanging around, and I was desperate. So I grabbed him, shoved on the gloves and put him in. He was tougher'n rawhide, but weak. And he didn't know the first letter in the alphabet of boxing. Prayne chopped him to ribbons. But he hung on for two sickening rounds, when he fainted. Starvation, that was all. Battered! You couldn't have recognized him. I gave him half a dollar and a square meal. You oughta seen him wolf it down. He hadn't had the end of a bite ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... question calls to my mind one of the most interesting and remarkable events of Indian history. I will endeavour to give you a brief account of it. I refer to the invention of an alphabet by a native Cherokee named George Guess or Guyst, who knew not how to speak English and was never taught to read English books. It was in 1824-5 that this invention began to attract considerable attention. Having ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... of the Othman Empire, p. 94. Murad, or Morad, may be more correct: but I have preferred the popular name to that obscure diligence which is rarely successful in translating an Oriental, into the Roman, alphabet.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... with the enemy. Then he called Jessica from the deep window where she had been at work on the quaint old account-books of the shop, as great curiosities as anything in it, since they were kept in Venetian, but by means of the Hebrew alphabet. She spoke Italian, and to her the young men made known their wants. She said a few words to her father, and he ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... he did not expect it. He had come out here because it was a fine night, and the night air cooled his brain for his studies. His heart, hammering on his life's anvil, contradicted him. He could not have repeated the Hebrew alphabet. His head, bent a little forward in the agony of listening, whirled madly round; the ambient darkness ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... 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,' etc. In the present instance we see it doubled ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Chrysostom, were converted to Catholicism. Most of them, however, seem to have been only half Arians, like their famous bishop Ulphilas. He was by birth a Goth—some say a Cappadocian—was consecrated between 341 and 348, in Constantinople. He gave the Goths an alphabet of their own, formed after the Greek, and made for them a translation of the Bible, of great value as a record of ancient German. He died in Constantinople before 388—probably ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... 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 ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... than extensive gardens, through my casement, and the shadow of a tall tree impending over the skylight of the bath-room was, when windy, cast so distinctly on its panes as to convince me of the neighborhood of an English elm, the foliage of which tree I knew like an alphabet. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... 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 and the noodles. She has also produced a little grated ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... which gave his father great gratification was his fondness for reading. He never had to be taught to read. He learned, himself. That is, he was so eager to learn that so soon as he had mastered the alphabet, he was always taking his picture books to his mother or sister, and getting them to spell the words for him. In this way he got over all his difficulties with surprising rapidity, and at five years of age could ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... He would read them, line by line, each Sabbath for the others to memorize. To make this task of memorization easier many of the Jewish hymns were written in acrostic form—that is, each line or stanza began with a different letter in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... serious objection to her. Medical men, consulted about her case discovered certain physiological anomalies in it which led them to suspect the woman of feigning dumbness, for some reason best known to herself. She obstinately declined to learn the deaf and dumb alphabet—on the ground that dumbness was not associated with deafness in her case. Stratagems were invented (seeing that she really did possess the use of her ears) to entrap her into also using her speech, and failed. Efforts were made to induce her to answer questions relating to her past ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... 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, eleven punches had been cut. At the end ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... 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 ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... in my own country, the Talking Cricket told me - because my feet burned - that the alphabet had been swallowed by the cat - that was hung to a tree by a dog - that was owned by the director ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... 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 ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 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
... establishment with one big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm had ever managed to do before. We were ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the beginnings of what is called our Literature. Literature really means letters, for it comes from a Latin word littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet. Words are made by letters of the alphabet being set together, and our literature again by words being set together; ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... large tract of land to the left of the town; the tombs are large, and in shape resemble the last letter in the Greek alphabet ([Greek: Omega]). Strange that it should be the last letter. Most of them are painted white, and they have from the ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... French missionary came into contact with Negroes he considered it his duty to enlighten the unfortunates and lead them to God. As early as 1634 Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in Canada, rejoiced that he had again become a real preceptor in that he was teaching a little Negro the alphabet. Le Jeune hoped to baptize his pupil as soon as he learned sufficient to understand the Christian doctrine.[1] Moreover, evidence of a general interest in the improvement of Negroes appeared in the Code Noir which made it incumbent upon ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... traditions of the ancient Mexican and Central American people. His style is diffuse, sometimes confused, and rather tedious; and some of his theories are very fanciful. But he has discovered the key to the Maya alphabet and translated one of the old Central American books. No careful student of American archaeology can afford to neglect what he ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... because there is no faith in any man. Jealousy of their wives, and dread of espionage, destroy brotherly love and friendship. The child brought up by his slave-mother—never experiencing a father's caress, and afterwards estranged by the Arabian alphabet, (education,) hides his feelings in his own heart even from his companions; from his childhood, thinks only for himself; from the first beard are every door, every heart shut for him: husbands look ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R's, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... The tradition of Babylonian culture in western Asia was broken; new influences began to work there, and the cuneiform system of writing to be disused. Room was given for the introduction of a new form of script, and the Phoenician alphabet, in which the books of the Old Testament were written, made its way into Canaan. When Joshua crosses the Jordan there is no longer any trace in Palestine of ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... after this she pored over her new treasures, until one day Miss Fletcher brought her a primer, and the seventeen-year-old girl grappled for the first time with the alphabet. After that she was loath to have the book out of her hand, going painfully and slowly over the lessons, mastering each in turn ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... and the nights correspondingly cool. We have a good deal of wind. I wrote a letter to Drs. Overweg and Barth jointly, calling upon them to assist me in case the Sfaxee would not wait for his money until the return of the courier. Dr. Overweg consents. I wrote out the Tuarick alphabet. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... on the origin of Tree-worship, and therefore that, perhaps, through ignorance, I have omitted something. Sir Richard did write in the sixties and seventies on Tree-alphabets, the Ogham Runes and El Mushajjar, the Arabic Tree-alphabet,—and had theories and opinions as to its origin; but he did not, I know, connect them in any way, however remote, with Catullus. I therefore venture to think you will quite agree with me, that they have no business here, but should appear in connection ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... first to the key word of his topic in this dictionary alphabet of selections and perchance he may find toast, story, definition or verse that may felicitously introduce his remarks. Then as he proceeds to outline his talk and to put it into sentences, he may find under one of the many subject headings a bit which will happily ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... could not understand. And to the wisest man, wide as may be his vision, the Chinese mind and character remain of a depth as infinite as is its possibility of expansion. The volume of Chinese nature is one of which as yet but the alphabet is ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... are distinguished from more recent ones in the same language by the forms of the letters, by the names which appear in them, and by archaisms in grammar and orthography. Inscriptions in the Greek tongue are rare, though the letters of the Greek alphabet, scratched on walls at a little height from the ground, and thus evidently the work of school-boys, show that Greek must have been extensively ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... at "The Cock", between one and two o'clock in the morning. On the next day he was cooler and wiser. Greek he thought might be tedious as he discovered that he would have to begin again from the very alphabet. He would therefore abandon that idea. Greek was not the thing for him, but he would take up the sanitary condition of the poor in London. A fellow could be of some use in that way. In the meantime he would keep his appointment with Miss Demolines, simply because it ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... palatable things, unwholesome. So I shall prescribe Rudolph's company for myself, to ward off an attack of moral indigestion. I am very glad he has come back—really glad," she added, conscientiously. "Poor old Rudolph! what between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the alphabet—What are those things, mon ami, that are always going up and down in ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... dualism became still greater when in 1219 the Serbs cast their lot with orthodoxy. The Croats, like the Slovenes, adopted Roman Catholicism, the Latin alphabet, and the culture of Rome. The Serbs accepted Greek Orthodoxy, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the culture ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... Jack Easy was not only very sore, but very hungry, and as Mr Bonnycastle informed him that he would not only have plenty of cane, but also no breakfast, if he did not learn his letters, Johnny had wisdom enough to say the whole alphabet, for which he received a great deal of praise, the which, if he did not duly appreciate, he at all events infinitely preferred to beating. Mr Bonnycastle perceived that he had conquered the boy by one hour's well-timed severity. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Clipstone was a success. Gillian was at home, and every one found congeners. Lady Merrifield's sister, Miss Mohun, pounced upon Miss Prescott as a coadjutor in the alphabet of good works needed in the neglected district of Arnscombe, where Mr. Earl was wifeless, and the farm ladies heedless; but they were interrupted by Mysie running up to claim Miss Prescott for a game at croquet. "Uncle Redgie was so glad to see the hoops ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... men, 'above suspicion of intentional deception'. They ask the table where Green is. Smith, Jones and Robinson have no idea, Brown firmly believes that Green is in Rome. The table begins to move, kicks and answers, by aid of an alphabet and knocks, that Green is at Machrihanish, where, on investigation, he is proved to be. Later, Brown is able to show (let us hope by documentary evidence), that he had heard Green was going to Machrihanish, instead of to Rome as he had intended, but this ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... ita, only the forms are developed into a more perfect system. The letters employed are the Cyrillian, held to have been invented by St. Cyril in the Ninth Century. They are on the whole well adapted to express the many sounds of the Russian alphabet, for which the Latin letters would be wholly inadequate, and must perforce be employed in some such uncouth combinations as those which communicate a grotesque appearance to Polish. It would be out of place here to discuss the Ecclesiastical Sclavonic employed in so many of the early writings ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... "When Uncle Simon went out to the tannery this morning, I just took advantage of his absence to type out the alphabet on his machine. Now then, you glance over that and compare the faulty letters with those in the facsimile! What do ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... fact I seemed to do it of myself, constrained thereto by what the Emperor Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year we had a parlor with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that kept out ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... own subconscious self," said the Tracer quietly. "Science has been forced to admit such things, and, as you know, we are on the verge of understanding the alphabet of some of the unknown forces which we must some ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... opinion that if the little girl was backward in some things she was probably advanced in others, and a little regular teaching would soon set the balance right. When Fraulein Rottenmeier saw that he was not ready to support her, and evidently quite ready to undertake teaching the alphabet, she opened the study door, which she quickly shut again as soon as he had gone through, remaining on the other side herself, for she had a perfect horror of the A B C. She walked up and down the dining-room, ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... for children in their fourth year.' But how much greater still is the tribute of admiration, irresistibly drawn from us, when we behold an absolute monarch, the greatest general of his age, eminent as a writer in the highest departments of literature, descending, in a manner, to teach the alphabet to the children of his kingdom; bestowing his care, his persevering assiduity, his influence and his power, in diffusing plain and useful knowledge among his subjects, in opening to their minds the first and most important ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... This reference to India, also learnedly advocated by M. Langles, was inevitable in those days: it had not then been proved that India owed all her literature to far older civilisations and even that her alphabet the Nagari, erroneously called Devanagari, was derived through Phoenicia and Himyar-land from Ancient Egypt. So Europe was contented to compare The Nights with the Fables of Pilpay for upwards of a century. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... smooth face of a rock, several square rods in 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 ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... of a famous poem by Gordon, Kotzo shel Yod, literally "the tittle of the Yod" the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The poem in question pictures the tragedy of a woman who remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of a ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... attendance was to go round visiting to obtain recruits, and to cultivate an acquaintance with the parents of the old scholars. In three months the children had been reduced to some sort of order, taught the alphabet and the way to sew; they could repeat a few texts, and sing a few hymns with some approach to sweetness. But perhaps of more importance still, they had learned to love and obey their teacher. Before her return to ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... remarkable genius, combined with a prurient ambition. A friend who wished to present him with an earthen-ware cup, asked him what device he would have upon it. "Paint me," he answered, "an angel with wings and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world." He learned his alphabet from an old music-book; at eight years of age he was sent to a charity-school, and he spent his little pocket-money at a circulating library, the books of which he ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... poured 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." It was not until some days afterwards that I remembered ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... stamped envelope, should not 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 her ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Syndicate had no individual names. The spring-armoured ships were termed "repellers," and were numbered, and the crabs were known by the letters of the alphabet. Each repeller was in charge of a Director of Naval Operations; and the whole naval force of the Syndicate was under the command of a Director-in-chief. On this momentous occasion this officer was on board of Repeller No. 1, and commanded the ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... say the right things, or, even more charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too, it was a very charming letter. She told him about her music, and about a Suffrage meeting to which Henry had taken her, and she asserted, half seriously, that she had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it "fascinating." The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever serious? Didn't the letter show the most engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... touched. It ceased to be a creative art (if it had ever aspired to such a function), and was never the embodiment of individual thought. This phase prevailed under different manifestations in Assyria and China. Pictorial art had, in fact, become merely the nursing mother of the alphabet, guiding its first steps—the hieroglyphic delineation or expression of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... study, and was persevering and brave enough to learn the letters of the alphabet and how to spell and to write after he had grown to manhood. We can be sure, therefore, that James was the right sort of boy, and that he would have mastered books if he had been given the chance, ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... instance, he will say, "as many fingers as a man has and two more." To express one hundred he would say, "five times as many fingers and toes as a man has," and so on. It is not a written language, but the Moravians have adapted the English alphabet to it and are teaching the Eskimos to read and write. Mr. Stewart in his work has adapted the Cree syllabic characters to the Eskimo, and he is teaching the Ungava people to write by this method, which is largely phonetic. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... clergyman, to give, as a warning to others, publicity to a letter he had just received from the East. The clergyman, it seems, had advertised in the 'Times' for pupils, and gave for address a certain letter of the Greek alphabet. To this address there came in due time an answer from a gentleman, dated Constantinople, stating that he was an Anglo-Indian on his way to England, to place his two sons in an educational establishment; but that having, by an excursion to Jerusalem, exhausted his immediate resources, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... than the books which they collect; and if it were otherwise, the large industry which lies in the purchase and re-sale of literary property could not exist. The buyer whose knowledge is in advance of that of the salesman is a party whom Mr. —— and Mr. —— and the remainder of the alphabet pharisaically admire, while they privily harbour toward him sadly unchristian feelings ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... has long been recognized. All of the earlier literature of mankind treats largely of these gods, for it is an interesting fact that in the history of any civilized people, the evolution of psychotheism is approximately synchronous with the invention of an alphabet. In the earliest writings of the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and the Greeks, this stage is discovered, and Osiris, Indra, and Zeus are characteristic representatives. As psychotheism and written language ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... I have no specific to give as a preventive for sea-sickness. Even the Phoenicians who had time, during the intervals of their hardy voyaging, to invent the alphabet, were unable to devise a remedy for the mal de mer. Custom does not create immunity, for even the mighty Nelson, who had a life-long acquaintance with the ocean, was afflicted with sea-sickness to the end of his days. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... girl led a lonesome, quiet, unchildlike life. Aunt Jane tried to teach her to read and write, but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if you read them, "kind o' fables," as the country folk said. They were all simple ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... eyesight is of more value than hearing. Special institutions are in existence today which can take these deaf mutes when small and so teach them to make audible sounds that they can make themselves understood—at least partially. Lip reading is a wonderful improvement over the deaf and dumb alphabet, and ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... applying to Q. Y. Z., who had the education of two interesting orphans to negotiate for, and who was naturally desirous of doing it as economically as possible; and at night she was at home, writing modest, business-like epistles to every letter in the alphabet in every conceivable or inconceivable part of ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the last power and a half is due to Tickler itself. Gussy, the tickler's already eliminated absenteeism, alcoholism and aboulia in numerous urban areas—and that's just one letter of the alphabet! If Tickler doesn't turn us into a nation of photo-memory constant-creative-flow geniuses in six ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet." ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... say, Darby," returned the other, "that it's a kind of universal spelling-book amongst us, and so it is—an alphabet aisily larned. Your health, now and under all circumstances! Teddy, or Thaddeus, I drink to your symmetry and inexplicable proportions; and I say for your comfort, my worthy distillator, that if you are not so refulgent in beauty as Venus, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... had consecrated his own Church of St. Peter, Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... a great good that nearly all our people are taught to read, but it is a small fraction of the community that reads to much good purpose. Children, so soon as they have acquired the use of the alphabet, are inundated with little juvenile stories, some of them good, but most of them silly, and many vulgar. As they grow older, successions of similar works of fiction await them, until they arrive at adolescence, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... appear. It now occurred to him that the spark might represent a part of speech, either a letter or a number; the absence of the spark, another part; and the duration of its absence, or of the spark itself, a third; so that an alphabet might be easily formed, and words indicated. In a few days he had completed rough drafts of the necessary apparatus, which he displayed to his fellow-passengers. Five years later, the captain of the ship identified under oath Morse's completed instrument with that which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget that nothing matters—nothing in ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... alone is not sufficient. There are many people who think to obtain grand results in this way, and who up to a mature age spend many hours daily in mechanical labour. That is about the same, as if we tried every day to pronounce the alphabet with greater volubility! You can employ your time ...
— Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln • Robert Schumann
... for a minute. Dance for a minute. See how many you can count in a minute. Say the alphabet backward. Do the exact opposite of three things ordered by the company. Crow like a cock. Say "Gig whip" ten times very rapidly. Say "Mixed biscuits" ten times very rapidly. Say rapidly: "She stood on the steps of Burgess's Fish Sauce Shop selling shell fish." Say rapidly: "Peter ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... converted the barbarian in the forest. He has preached the crusades in magnificent cathedrals, and crossed stormy seas in his frail bark. He has made the schools famous by his literary achievements, and taught children the alphabet in the woodland cell. He has been good and bad, proud and humble, rich and poor, arrogant and gentle. He has met the shock of lances on his prancing steed, and trudged barefoot from town to town. He has copied manuscripts in the lonely Scottish isle, and bathed the fevered brow of the pilgrim ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... words are composed of letters, representing the primary sounds of language, maintained that all the things represented by these words were created by God by means of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. But at the same time the Pythagorean theory certainly embodies a considerable element of truth. Modern science demonstrates nothing more clearly than the importance of numerical relationships. Indeed, "the history of science shows us the gradual transformation of crude facts of experience into ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... and Ellen Barrow was, under his directions, my instructress. I do not remember that I was much troubled with the sight of books; but she drew a number of pictures of various objects, and made me repeat their names, and then she cut out the alphabet in cardboard, by which means I very soon knew my letters. If I was sick she never attempted to teach me, so that all the means offered me of gaining knowledge were pleasurable, and I thus took at once a strong liking to learning, which has never deserted me. Before ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... necessary to refer to them, astronomers have invented a system. To only the very brightest are proper names attached; others are noted according to the degree of their brightness, and called after the letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. Our own word 'alphabet' comes, you know, from the first two letters of this Greek series. As this particular star is the brightest in the constellation Centaurus, it is called ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... write, though, better'n some of the boys up at school. I saw lots of names on the shed door. See here now," and scrambling down, Ben pulled out a cherished bit of chalk and flourished off ten letters of the alphabet, one on each of the dark stone slabs that paved ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... among his people, I may state that, within these few years, after the lapse of nearly fifty, I had a call from a respectable old man, who, having heard I was in Edinburgh, had found me out, and announced himself to be Mr. ——, who had taught me the alphabet, and first guided my hand to wield the pen which now records this incident. I have rarely met with an occurrence more gratifying to my feelings, than when the old gentleman (for he was a gentleman in the best sense of the term, though a country schoolmaster) ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... perceived the true descent of this people, which does not appear of terrestrial origin, but descended from some of the inhabitants of the moon, because the principal language spoken there, and in the centre of Africa, is very nearly the same. Their alphabet and method of writing are pretty much the same, and show the extreme antiquity of this people, and their exalted origin. I here give you a specimen of their writing [Vide Otrckocsus de Orig. Hung. p. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Bridge' by the French. 'Every intelligent being,' said 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 ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... his name for God may be, Nor what his wisdom holds of heaven and hell, The alphabet whereby he strives to spell His lines of life, nor where he bends his knee, Since, with his grave before him, he can see White Peace above it, while the churchyard bell Poised in its tower, poised now, to boom his knell, Seems but ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... tried, but they have not been put to abstract reasoning. Their perceptive powers are large, as they are much exercised in procuring food, etc. Anything requiring perception only is readily mastered, the alphabet will be known in a few lessons; figures are soon recognised, and the quantities they represent, but addition from figures alone always presents difficulties for a while, but in a little time, however, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... of people in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... Chiefs of existing mankind, could not but be entertaining to the young man; and silently, if he wished to read the actual Time, as sure enough he, with human and with royal eagerness, did wish,—they were here as the ALPHABET of it to him: important for years coming. Nay it is not doubted, the insight he here got into the condition of the Austrian Army and its management—"Army left seven days without bread," for one instance—gave him afterwards ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 occupied in ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... 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 ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... afterward that he has been tempted to continue the general subject, with the title of "Your Future Problems." The notation of your future problems will not be found at once among the known quantities, but with x, y, and z, at the other end of the alphabet. Often word symbols will be applicable, expressing at times disappointment and pain, at other times renewed effort, and finally the active phases of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... In thy dumb action, will I be as perfect As begging Hermits in their holy prayers. Thou shalt not sighe nor hold thy stumps to heauen, Nor winke, nor nod, nor kneele, nor make a signe; But I (of these) will wrest an Alphabet, And by still practice, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of 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 ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... civilization which they owed to Saturn; but the real intellectual culture was traced to Evander, who must not be regarded as a person who had come from Arcadia, but as the good man, as the teacher of the alphabet and of mental culture, which man gradually works out ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... you, Roderick, though you will not believe me, I am not made for moving about amid such a mob of human beings,—for this parade of heartless courtesy,—for keeping my attention on the qui vive to every letter of the alphabet, so that neither A nor Z may complain of being treated with disrespect,—for making low bows to her tenth cousin, and shaking hands warmly with my twentieth,—for this formal reverence to her parents,—for handing a flower from my nosegay of compliments to every ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... gentleman?' At all events, thought I, the term 'gentleman' 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 ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... necessarily be filed chronologically, even when separate books for each letter of the alphabet are maintained. In either case the search through the files for a letter copy is facilitated by placing the name, address and date of a letter ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... a picture alphabet,' said Mabel, and was quite pleased, though of course she was much too old to care for alphabets. Only when one is very unhappy and very dull, anything is better than nothing. She opened ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... 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 ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... 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 ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... "{}" is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... great objection to school-keeping, but I find in that as in almost everything else I set myself to as a matter of duty, I soon became enamored of it. A boy came three times last week, and on the third time could act as monitor to the rest through a great portion of the alphabet. He is a real Mokhatla, but I have lost sight of him again. If I get them on a little, I shall translate some of your infant-school hymns into Sichuana rhyme, and you may yet, if you have time, teach them the tunes to them. I, poor mortal, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... saved his country by solving a tremendously difficult scientific puzzle in a simple way, by sheer reasoning power, and without apparatus. The sociology professor struck a responsive chord in us: for since our earliest years we had wigwagged to each other as Boy Scouts, learned the finger alphabet of the deaf and dumb so that we might maintain communication during school hours, strung a telegraph wire between our two homes, admired Poe's "Gold Bug" together and devised boyish cipher codes in which to send each other postcards when chance separated us. But we had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... abiding-places. There is no rest for those who learn, and ignorance is a great deal more complete and perfect a thing, here, at any rate, than knowledge; with which paradox let me hug my ignorance, only regretting that I ever spoiled it by learning even so much as my alphabet. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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
... content to hand over the Round Towers to Christians of the sixth or the tenth century, when we find that these Christians were really eminent in knowledge as well as piety, had arched churches by the side of these campanilia, gave an alphabet to the Saxons, and hospitality and learning to the students of all western Europe—and the more readily, as we got in exchange proofs of a Pagan race having a Pelasgic architecture, and the arms and ornaments of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... trousers and spick-and-span shirt-cuffs were a little damaged. This duty over, I met the escort sergeant no more, but was transferred to the care of a quaint old boy who made an astonishing display of learning. He had four or five Latin proverbs at his command. He knew the Greek alphabet, had picked up a bit of Hindostani on Indian service, and a little bit of French and Turkish in the Crimea. All these he aired upon me in a very natural manner, and I was much impressed with his erudition, until a grinning ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes with red capital letters of the alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small letters. There was a writing-lamp that cast an aesthetic glow upon another appropriate attitude—and there was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and another with MS. paper ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... 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," ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... exaggerate the debt. Greek art is essentially self-originated, the product of a unique, incommunicable genius. As well might one say that Greek literature is of Asiatic origin, because, forsooth, the Greek alphabet came from Phenicia, as call Greek art the offspring of Egyptian or oriental art because of the impulses received in the days of its beginning. [Footnote: This comparison is perhaps not ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... au fond de quelque armoire Ce vieil alphabet tout jauni, Ma premire leon d'histoire, Mon ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... Cyril before mentioned, but also Father Cyril himself. Each such witness appended to his signature a full list of his dignities and qualifications: one man in printed characters, another in a flowing hand, a third in topsy-turvy characters of a kind never before seen in the Russian alphabet, and so forth. Meanwhile our friend Ivan Antonovitch comported himself with not a little address; and after the indentures had been signed, docketed, and registered, Chichikov found himself called upon to pay only the merest trifle in the way of Government percentage ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... alphabet? Because in my eyes it is quite superfluous. A mad idea once occurred to me of picking some naked gypsy child out of the streets, with the intention of making a happy being therefrom. What is happiness in the world? Ease and ignorance. Had I a child of my ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... introduction of five species of grain that took place under a particular king in a particular year, the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in a general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like a common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... verse does not trip but rather lumbers, who is unable to write anything worthy of sale and whose ideas refuse to be crowded into the right number of feet, it might be an excellent thing occasionally to drop all thought of pentameters and amphibrachs and go back to the old-fashioned rhymed alphabet. ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... settle within the Roman territory. Their request was granted, upon condition that they should surrender all their arms; but this condition was imperfectly fulfilled. The celebrated Bishop Ulphilas about this time converted the Goths to Arianism, invented a Gothic alphabet, and infused among the Goths a hatred for the Catholic faith, which served to increase their zeal in all their future conflicts with the Romans. Ill-treated by the Roman commissioners who had been sent by the Emperor Valens to superintend ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will, pronounce O and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 difficulty. We had ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and folded wing Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet 5 Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say, To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild-wood I did lie, A child—with ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Eruditorum Critico-Curiosa," 1689, 1701, 4 vols., 12mo., being an alphabetical account of writers—extracts from whom are in the public literary Journals of Europe from 1665 to 1700—with the title of their works—is Beughem's best production, and if each volume had not had a separate alphabet, and contained additions upon additions, the work would have proved highly useful. His "Gallia Euridita," Amst., 1683, 12mo., is miserably perplexing. In addition to Marchand, consult the Polyhist. Literar. of Morhof, vol. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... flirted and dined and sang the night away. Robert Tomes echoed the strain in his tale of college life a little later, under stricter social and ecclesiastical conditions. There was a more serious vein also. In 1827 the Kappa Alpha Society was the first of the younger brood of the Greek alphabet—descendants of the Phi Beta Kappa of 1781—and in 1832 Father Eells, as he is affectionately called, founded Alpha Delta Phi, a brotherhood based upon other aims and sympathies than those of Mr. Philip Slingsby, but one which appealed instantly to clever men in college, and has not ceased ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... ethical fact for him; chemical reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical combination, and not a mechanical mixture. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the tether was cut. There were dreads, shrinkings, bewilderments, confusions to encounter; the difficulties of pilotage in unknown seas, of self-knowledge, and guidance suddenly needed in new ranges of the soul; fresh temptations, fresh possibilities to deal with; everything untested, the alphabet of worldly ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... 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 to blame my noble friend because ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Again, if any one, wishing to decipher a letter written in Latin characters that are not placed in regular order, bethinks himself of reading a B wherever an A is found, and a C wherever there is a B, and thus of substituting in place of each letter the one which follows it in the order of the alphabet, and if by this means he finds that there are certain Latin words composed of these, he will not doubt that the true meaning of the writing is contained in these words, although he may discover this only by conjecture, and although it is possible that the writer of it did not arrange ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... our father, ministering to his habits and tastes, a good deal, I believe, for our sakes, and to keep near us. She was a coarse woman; and, unlike her race in general, exhibited but few outward demonstrations of attachment. When her work was done in the evening she sometimes taught us the alphabet and to spell words of three letters; the rest we mastered for ourselves, and taught each other, and so in process of time we were able to read. The like with writing: Nelly pointed out the rudiments, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable MISE-EN-SCENE, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time. Look over the magazines and Annuals of those years, and you will find many such, as "Mary Maywood," "Dora Dashwood," "Ella Ellwood" "Fanny Forrester," "Fanny Fern," "Jennie June," "Minnie Myrtle," and so on through the alphabet, one almost expecting to find a "Ninny Noodle." Examining one of Mrs. Lippincott's first scrapbooks of "Extracts from Newspapers," etc., which she had labelled, "Vanity, all is Vanity," I find many poems in her honour, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... has cost me many months' heavy work, 'while I bore burdens with dull patience and beat the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution[31],' I have, I hope, shown that I am not unmindful of all that I owe to men of letters. To the dead we cannot pay the debt of gratitude that is their due. Some relief is obtained from its burthen, if we in our turn make the men of our own generation ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... speak it. For at times she rejected the professional dictum of the doctor that the faculty of memory was wholly paralyzed or held in abeyance, even to the half-automatic recollection of his letters, yet she inconsistently began to teach him the alphabet with the same method, and—in her sublime unconsciousness of his manhood—with the same discipline as if he were a very child. When he had recovered sufficiently to leave his room, she would lead him to the porch before her window, and make him contented and happy by allowing him to watch her at ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... 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
... she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... regard to dramatic fitness or to my interests. Immersed in a subject with which they were all familiar, they were allusive, elliptic, and persistently technical. Many of the words I did catch were unknown to me. The rest were, for the most part, either letters of the alphabet or statistical figures, of depth, distance, and, once or twice, of time. The letters of the alphabet recurred often, and seemed, as far as I could make out, to represent the key to the cipher. The numbers clustering round them were mostly very small, with decimals. What maddened ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... 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 language ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... stock. It is pathetic to note, in these days of utmost prodigality in juvenile literature, that for the Pilgrim children, aside from the "Bible stories," some of the wonderful and mirth-provoking metrical renderings of the "Psalme booke," and the "horne booke," or primer (the alphabet and certain elementary contributions in verse or prose, placed between thin covers of transparent horn for protection), there was almost absolutely nothing in the meagre book-freight of the Pilgrim ark. ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... of foolscap which had been folded and sealed without an envelope, after the fashion of our great-grandfathers. On it was pasted a strip of the tape used in electric-recording instruments, and the characters were those of the Morse alphabet, rather an unusual sight nowadays, when receiving messages by sound is the universal practice. Underneath the row of dots and dashes had been written their English equivalents in Indiman's small, close ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... combinations of sounds, of dots and dashes marked on paper, of right-hand and left-hand deflections of a needle, of bells of different notes, or of other symbols by which a fixed combination is expressed for each character of the alphabet, for numerals, and for punctuation. While the code is designed for telegraphic uses it can be used not only for the conveyance of signals and messages by the electrical telegraphs, but also by any semaphoric or visual system, as by flashes of light, movements of a flag or even of the arms of ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... and sour 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 ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... and uses a sewing machine, and he was intelligent enough, so the report goes, when the machine had been taken to pieces in his presence, to put it together again without mistake. He once called off for me from a newspaper the names of the letters of our alphabet, and legibly wrote his English name, "John Willis Mik-ko." Mik-ko has a restless, inquisitive mind, and deserves the notice and care of those who are interested in the progress of this people. Seeking him one day at Orlando, I found him busily studying the ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... reveal it (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, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... illumination grew originally out of the decoration of the initial letters, our next point to notice is the penmanship. The alphabet which we now use is that formerly used by the Romans, who borrowed it from the Greeks, who in turn obtained it (or their modification of it) from the Phoenicians, who, lastly it is said, constructed it from that of the Egyptians. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... with the destined bibliomacher at the time of his assumption of short clothes. The alphabet is his first professional torture, and that only ushers him upon the gigantic task of learning to read and write his own language. Experience shows that this miracle of memory and associative reason may be in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... disappearance from Komorn forty years had passed. I was in the alphabet-class when we schoolboys went to the funeral of the rich lord, of whom people said afterward he was perhaps not dead, only disappeared. Among the people the belief was strong that Timar lived, and would some day reappear; possibly Athalie's words had set this idea afloat—at any rate, public opinion ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... with rough men while they ate their dinners, and he read passages from the Bible to women while they washed their husbands' clothes. And for a while he sat with a little girl in his lap teaching the child her alphabet. If it were possible for him he would do his duty. He would spare himself in nothing, though he might suffer even to fainting. And on this occasion he did suffer,—almost to fainting, for as he returned home in the afternoon he was ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... goddesses would give up and acquiesce. In fact, I seemed to do it of myself, constrained thereto by what the Emperor Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year, we had a parlor with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... mahogany secretary, placed a chair for Dorothy, and opened a great ledger before her, bending down, with one hand on the back of the chair, the other turning the leaves of the ledger. Considering the index, and the position of the letter B in the alphabet, he was a long time finding his place. Dorothy looked out of the window, over the tops of the yellowing woods, to the gray and turbid river below. Where the hemlocks darkened the channel of the glen, she heard the angry floods rushing down. The formless ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... 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 for ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... tree; byblos, inner bark of papyrus; or book, that is beech wood. But Buddha had learnt to write, as we find by a book translated into Chinese A.D. 76. In this book Buddha instructs his teacher; as in the "Gospel of the Infancy" Jesus explains to his teacher the meaning of the Hebrew alphabet. So Buddha tells his teacher the names of sixty-four alphabets. The first authentic inscription in India is of Buddhist origin, belonging to the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Florence—a Virginian by birth—one of the late census takers; told me that many more persons cannot read and write than is reported; one fact, amongst many others, that many persons who do not know the letters of the alphabet, have learned to write their own names; such are generally reported readers ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the proprietor's arm and led him to a carriage in waiting. Then he took him to Pine street, and introduced him, in the most deferential manner, to the broker who held half of New York at his disposal, and knew the city as he knew his alphabet. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... have hated ever since I had it, begins to appear before me in a new light. It is not only those dull and stupid children who are to learn lessons in that one-roomed schoolhouse—it is I. While they struggle with the alphabet and multiplication-table and the spelling of words in four syllables, their teacher has before him invaluable opportunities to acquire patience, self-control, and a sense of justice, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... which dwelt in the seventh century before our era on the banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in the plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimes wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrus brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoenician character. But when ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Richard tried to say something cheerful as his brothers entered, there was no response, and they sat down on the opposite sides of the fire, forlorn and silent, till Richard, who was printing some letters on card-board to supply the gaps in Aubrey's ivory Alphabet, called Harry to help him; but Ethel, as she sat at work, could only look at Norman, and wish she could devise ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and deeper, and his liking and respect for his young subordinate increased rapidly. Finally the ranger was given his first lesson in radio-telegraphy. While Lew was writing down for him the wireless alphabet, Charley was showing him how to make the letters on the spark-gap. Before they turned in for the night, the ranger had learned to distinguish the difference between the sound of a dot and of a dash as the signals ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... hear their alphabet. They knew it and they did not know it. What they knew was not very much. Ruster grew eager; he lifted the little boys up, each on one of his knees, and began to teach them. Liljekrona's wife went out and in and listened quite in amazement. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... The whole party then set off towards some fresh hunting grounds, and it was my hope and expectation that I should see nothing more of them till the spring. The boy was comfortably clothed, and he appeared to be well satisfied with the rest at the school, and had begun to learn the English alphabet, when, to my surprise, I found the mother, with the Indian, in my room, in about a week after they had left the Settlement with Pigewis, saying that they had parted from him in consequence of their not being able to obtain any provision; and that "they thought ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... Mahommedan soldier had begun to distinguish himself in the wars of Southern India. His education had been neglected; his extraction was humble. His father had been a petty officer of revenue; his grandfather a wandering dervise. But though thus meanly descended, though ignorant even of the alphabet, the adventurer had no sooner been placed at the head of a body of troops than he approved himself a man born for conquest and command. Among the crowd of chiefs who were struggling for a share of India, none could compare with him in the qualities of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 and ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... 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
... In my grammar, certes. I Was educated for a monk of all times, 100 And once I was well versed in the forgotten Etruscan letters, and—were I so minded— Could make their hieroglyphics plainer than Your alphabet. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... intelligently. Since he has been here, there have been signs of returning mental consciousness, and we have begun with him as with an infant. He knows and can call his own name, and is now learning the alphabet." ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion; shall know things ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... full. Reginald watched him with something like admiration, inwardly wondering if he would ever be able to find his way about this labyrinth of boxes, and strongly of opinion that only muffs like printers would think of arranging the alphabet in such an absurdly haphazard manner. The lower case being full up, Gedge meekly suggested that as he was yet several feet from his full size, they might as well lift the upper case down while it was being filled. Which done, the same process was repeated, only with more apparent regularity, ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... sensible parents toward our little boy. He never stepped inside of a school-house until he was seven years old, and, when he did so, it was to stay only a brief while. It was six months before he became acquainted with every letter of the alphabet, and no youngster of his years ever ruined more clothing than he. The destruction of shoes, hats, and trousers was enough to bankrupt many a father, and it often provoked a protest from his mother. I have seen him, within a ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... English poems whose author we know are four bearing the name of Cynewulf, Christ, Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles. In these he signs his name by means of runes inserted in the manuscript. These runes, which are at once letters of the alphabet and words, are made to fit into the context. They are ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... of consolation, forbidden to Israel when they sought to copy after the Philistines. "Neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for father or mother" (Jer. xvi. 7). The Irish language came from the Phoenician, the alphabet of both being composed of sixteen letters originally, the only alphabet in the world so agreeing. From the Irish came the Gaelic, Welsh, Cornwall, and ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... year. And this is called an age of skepticism. Man never believed in so many things as now: he never believed so much in himself. As to Nature, he knows her secrets: he can predict what she will do. He communicates with the next world by means of an alphabet which he has invented. He talks with souls at the other end of the spirit-wire. To be sure, neither of them says anything; but they talk. Is not that something? He suspends the law of gravitation as to his own body—he has learned how to evade it—as tyrants suspend the legal writs of habeas ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and operations, which, aptly joined together, do make one word that doth express their natures. By these letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... beginnings of what is called our Literature. Literature really means letters, for it comes from a Latin word littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet. Words are made by letters of the alphabet being set together, and our literature again by words being ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... attention of philologists Das Gothische Runenalphabet, (or The Gothic Runic Alphabet,) recently published by HERTZ of Berlin. "Before Wulfila, the Goths had an alphabet of twenty-five letters, formed according to the same principles, and bearing nearly the same names as the Runes of the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen, and probably arranged in the same ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... nothing gained by trying to teach a child to pronounce the letters of the alphabet, before the vocal organs are so developed that distinct utterance can be given to the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... of the children. Especially her sweet looks and signs gained the heart of little Charley Layton, the dumb boy at the lodge—the creature on whom Theodora bestowed the most time and thought. And on her begging to be shown the dumb alphabet, as the two sisters crossed fingers, they became, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... do, whatever you are able to give to your father, is part of his benefit bestowed upon you." So it is the benefit of my teacher that I have become proficient in liberal studies; yet we pass on from those who taught them to us, at any rate from those who taught us the alphabet; and although no one can learn anything without them, yet it does not follow that whatsoever success one subsequently obtains, one is still inferior to those teachers. There is a great difference between the beginning of a thing and its final ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... and was much attached to us all. I soon learned to like Aunt Martha better than I had expected, for though I thought her looks very terrible at first—and she was certainly firm—she was really kind and gentle. Under her instruction I gained the first knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, of which I was before profoundly ignorant. Of course she was very gentle with Ellen, as everybody was, and Fanny seemed to be very fond of her. She was courageous, too, as I before long had evidence. I remember one night being suddenly lifted in her arms, and carried out ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... that errors have been made in writing sentences, since it was not always possible to get a consistent answer to the question as to what part of a sentence constitutes a single word, and time was too limited for any extensive language study. The following alphabet has been used in ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Heaven, and that he had consecrated his own Church of St. Peter, Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... how she compromised by always using the abbreviation, both in writing and speaking. "She always calls him H," said Grandma Cobb, "and I tell her sometimes it doesn't look quite respectful to speak to her husband as if he were part of the alphabet." Grandma Cobb, if the truth had been told, was always in a state of ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... mythological Bacchus) is supposed to have gone to other and unknown countries. I imagine that those unknown countries were America. Pan, who accompanied Bacchus on his journey, taught those new men the alphabet. All this is related to the tradition of the arrival of bearded men, strangely dressed, in the American countries.... These traditions exist in the South as well as ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... him mangy, but he isn't, really. I'm going to cut its hair to make it grow thicker. I can say all the alphabet and lots of poetry. Shall I say my piece? No; I know what I'll do, I'll get you my cards, with E for ephalunt and X for swordfish on, and see if ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... but did not understand in the least. All she said was, "what funny words you use!" She went back to her alphabet—A, house; B, cat. It ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... animal WITH feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... point: It is disconcerting to talk about the ABCs, if the group already knows the alphabet. To devote any great part of a presentation to matters which the majority present already well understand is to assure that the main object will receive very little serious attention. Thus in talking about the school of the rifle, only a fool would start by explaining ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... concealed from him my designs upon Jew-German, and spoke of a better understanding of the original text. He smiled at this, and said I should be satisfied if I only learned to read. This vexed me in secret, and I concentrated all my attention when we came to the letters. I found an alphabet something like the Greek, of which the forms were easy, and the names, for the most part, not strange to me. All this I had soon comprehended and retained, and supposed we should now take up reading. That this was done from right to left I was well aware. But now all at ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... school reputation none too quickly. He first kindled my admiration for the classic giants of English literature, more especially the poets, taught me to appreciate the rolling periods of Homer, and even the beauty of the characters of the Greek alphabet. He was a voluminous student of the best in every form of ancient and modern literature. He always kept a copy of Milton, his favourite poet I think, on his desk, and, whenever a passage in the Greek or Latin classics occurred, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... are His alphabet!" Tavannes retorted, and heedless of the start of horror which a saying so near blasphemy excited among the Churchmen, he turned to Father Pezelay. "And you! You, too, I know!" he continued. "And you know me! And take this from me. Turn, father! ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... she said, eagerly; then remembering his helplessness, she added: "I will say over the letters of the alphabet, and when I reach the right one you ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... schools 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
... and x's Like an alphabet coming to strife. It seemed the discordant echo Of a row between husband ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... an English Concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a Catena; treading the constant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of an alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining and disjoining variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours' meditation, might furnish him unspeakably to the performance of more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up the infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... they had at least furnished her with the opportunity of studying the notebook she had found in the secret hiding place, and of making herself conversant with the gang's cipher; and she now set to work upon it. It was a numerical cipher. Each letter of the alphabet in regular rotation was represented by its corresponding numeral; a zero was employed to set off one letter from another, and the addition of the numerals between the zeros indicated the number of the letter involved. Also, there being but twenty-six letters in the alphabet, it was obvious ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the Saviour says: "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot (iota) or one tittle (keraia) shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The iota (Hebrew yod) is the letter i or y, which in the square writing is the smallest in the alphabet ([Hebrew: y]), but not in the ancient Hebrew, Ph[oe]nician, or Samaritan. The keraia, little turn, is that which distinguishes one letter from another; as [Hebrew: d], d, from [Hebrew: r], r; or [Hebrew: b], b, from [Hebrew: k], k. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the "contract" of 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... victories which he has won:—sweet flowers of fancy reared by him:—kind shapes of beauty which he has devised and moulded. The world enters into the artist's studio, and scornfully bids him a price for his genius, or makes dull pretence to admire it. What know you of his art? You cannot read the alphabet of that sacred book, good old Thomas Newcome! What can you tell of its glories, joys, secrets, consolations? Between his two best-beloved mistresses, poor Clive's luckless father somehow interposes; and with sorrowful, even angry ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... knife, with which he was enabled to give a more graceful form to his [C with square sides], by rounding it into C; then two such, turned different ways, with a distinguishing cut between them, made CD, to express a thousand; and as, by that time, the alphabet was introduced, they recognised the similarity of the form at which they had thus arrived to the first letter of Mille, and called it M, or 1000. The half of this DC was adopted by a ready analogy for 500. With that discovery the invention of the Romans stopped, though they ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... Madeira, i.e., not a generation or two after the peopling of the nearest parts of the opposite Continent, but many ages later; in which case both the population and its civilization may be but things of yesterday. In the twelfth century, Iceland had an alphabet and the art of writing. Had these grown up within the island itself, the inference would be that its population was of great antiquity; since time must be allowed for their evolution—even as time must be allowed for the growth of acorns on an oak. But the art may be newer than ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... both their office and the souls of the people, yea, even God and His Word. They do not have to fall, they are already fallen all too horribly, they would need to become children, and begin to learn their alphabet, which they imagine that they have long since ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... edition published by Longmans, Green, and Co., London. A number of fragments of Greek text, and sketches, have been omitted due to the difficulty of representing them as plain text. However, small fragments of Greek have been transcribed in brackets "{}" using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table, ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... world thrown away upon us, because we live in it such a moment! What mortal work has ever been done since the world began! Because we have no time. No lesson is taught. We are snatched away from our study before we have learned the alphabet. As the world now exists, I confess it to you frankly, my dear pastor and instructor, it seems to me all a failure, because we do ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you!' cried the Captain eyeing him sternly, 'as don't know his own native alphabet! Go away a bit and come back again ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the messages by running through the alphabet till the spirit interpreter knocked ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... your opinions. They come in upon you, you do not know how. Youth is receptive of anything new. You can learn a vast deal more easily than many of us older people can. Set down a man who has never learned the alphabet, to learn his letters, and see what a task it is for him. Or if he takes a pen in his hand for the first time, look how difficult the stiff wrist and thick knuckles find it to bend. Yours is the time for forming ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... pyramids larger than those of Sachara in Egypt, at Cholula, Otamba, Paxaca, Mitlan, Tlascola, and on the mountains of Tescoca, together with hieroglyphics, planispheres and zodiacs, a symbolic and Photenic alphabet; papyrus, metopes, triglyphs, and temples and buildings of immense grandeur; military roads, aqueducts, viaducts, posting stations and distances; bridges of great grandeur and massive character, all presenting the most positive ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... most probably," he replied. "It is written in the primitive Semitic alphabet, which, as you know, is practically identical with primitive Greek. It is written from right to left, like the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Moabite, as well as the earliest Greek, inscriptions. The paper is common cream-laid notepaper, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... 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 a ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... the fighi and their scholars sitting on the sand. The children are taught their letters by having them written on a flat board, of a hard wood, brought from Bornou and Soudan, and repeating them after their master. When quite perfect in their alphabet, they are allowed to trace over the letters already made, they then learn to copy sentences, and to write small words dictated to them. The master often repeats verses from the Koran, in a loud voice, which the boys learn by saying them after him, and when they begin ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... with them a new word which was to reveal the hidden meaning. Again, they would substitute for the letters composing words the numbers that these letters represent in the Hebrew numerical system and form the strangest combinations with them. In the Zohar, all the letters of the alphabet come before God, each one begging to be chosen as the creative ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... their actual sounds. It recommends such forms as tho, thru, enuf, quartet, 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 ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... bodily 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 of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... 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 ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... a club of college undergraduates which called itself the Lost Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have offered a reward at once and would have beaten up the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were neglected. As the years went on the other letters gradually assumed its duties. The philological chores, so to ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... A. B. C. — a prayer to the Virgin, in twenty three verses, beginning with the letters of the alphabet in their order — is said to have been written "at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." It was first printed in Speght's ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... great-aunt, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. With her assistance, and the help of her granddaughter, Biddy, I struggled through the alphabet, as if it had been a bramble bush, getting considerably worried and scratched by each letter. After that, the nine figures began to add to my misery, but at last I began to read, write, and cipher ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... lips certainly suggest the latter view; if indeed the body and the head (in a different sort of marble) really belong to one another. Ah! the more closely you consider the fragments of antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek aesthetic alphabet, the less positive will your conclusions become, because less conclusive the data regarding artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however, to the end that in a congruous atmosphere, in a real perspective, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... adroitness equal to their own, and so encouraged them to commence a language leading to intimacy with a rapidity that may well appear magical to the uninitiated. In short, the man really had the language of the very elect of polite society. If you are not versed in this alphabet of mute intelligence, you are in the ranks with waiters and linen-drapers, and are, as far as ladies are concerned, tail-coated to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dough to bake in them. For five cents the boys and girls can get the use of an oven, and dough enough to bake little cakes. They often make cakes shaped like animals. The peddler makes the letters of the alphabet in dough. Then he bakes them in the oven for the boys and girls. With these cake letters they often learn their ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... atmosphere—a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their heads: and no time for a word more about anything except you: you, and double-you,—and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet next, perhaps, out ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... to hurt, March. Why, man, that's a terror! You have to have the Greek alphabet backward, and never miss chapel all term to get a show at that. The Goodwin brings two hundred ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that of Coisl. 20, (in the Paris Library,—our EVAN. 36;) supplemented by several other MSS., which, for convenience, I have arbitrarily designated by the letters of the alphabet.(532) ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... the individual referred to. Paul doubtless pointed out the pope particularly as the "man of sin," "the son of perdition" (2 Thess. 2:3). In former ages, before the modern system of notation was introduced, the only method of denoting numbers was by employing the letters of the alphabet, certain letters having the power of number as well as of sound. We still employ the same system for certain purposes. The number of a name was simply the number denoted by the several letters of ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... and write, but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if you read them, "kind o' fables," ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... school." Mason took the advice. When the races came off, the stag beetles were so erratic that no prize was awarded, and they immediately ceased to be the rage. The rage for stag beetles was succeeded by a rage for secret alphabets. One boy invented a secret alphabet made of simple hieroglyphics, which was imparted only to a select few, who spent their spare time in corresponding with each other by these cryptic signs. The boy who gave good advice was not of those initiated ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... Ackermann; von Vogelweid' ist mein Pflug.[6] Ich wohne im Bhmer Land. Gehssig, widerwrtig und widerstrebend soll ich Euch [o Tod] immer mehr sein, denn Ihr habt mir den zwlften Buchstaben,[7] meiner Freuden Hort, gar grausam aus dem Alphabet entrckt. Ihr habt meiner Wonne lichte Sommerblume mir aus des Herzens Anger auf ewig ausgerodet. Ihr habt meines Glckes Inbegriff, meine auserwhlte Turteltaube, arglistig entfremdet; Ihr habt unwiederbringlichen Raub an mir getan. Erwgt es selber, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... was no stronger at the expiration of that time than he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier in the face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and be wheeled down to the sea-side. Consistent in his odd tastes, the child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of this carriage, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... will, and full of anti-slavery fervor; and Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio, with his broad shoulders, giant frame, unquenchable love of freedom, and almost as familiar with the slavery question, in all its aspects, as he was with the alphabet. These, all now gone to their reckoning, were the elect of freedom in the lower branch of this memorable Congress. They all greeted me warmly, and the more so, perhaps, because my reported illness and doubtful ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... 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 this, as well as every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... occasion, from eleven in the morning, when he had started to try and collect the seventy-five francs requisite, up to six in the afternoon, he had only raised three francs, contributed by three letters (M., V., and R.) of his famous list. All the rest of the alphabet, having, like himself, their quarter to pay, had adjourned ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... of her time, at least, before he was able to gather any coherent meaning from what she was saying. Even then he caught only a fragment, here and there, and for the rest—so far as Ramsey was concerned—she might as well have been reciting the Swedish alphabet. ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... was allowed to go out foraging, under escort of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted sizes. The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the beans, the onions and the noodles. She has also produced a ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. Citizens, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... veracious reports respecting the latest hidden thoughts of "Badinguet," and vivid descriptions of the respective toilets of the Empress Eugenie, Baroness de B—-, Madame la Comtesse C—-, la belle Marquise d'E—-, and all the other fashionable letters of the alphabet—chronicling the very latest achievements in "Robes en train" and "Costumes a ravir" of the great artist Worth. Even the men folk of America—"shoddy" of course—dote on those accounts of European toilets, which we never see given in any of our papers, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... people possess an alphabet, but books were written, characters were engraved; and some have even gone so far as to claim that the art of printing was known, because Job says, "Would that my words were ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... attention was not directed—The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet—but to the astonishment of the family, one day, when a book was shewn me to keep me from crying, I began spelling the names of different objects—this was a source of wonder to all in the neighborhood, particularly the blacks—and this learning ...
— The Confessions Of Nat Turner • Nat Turner
... themselves, Peregrine on one side, and Patience on the other, to study their lessons. They were given queer little books, called the New England Primer, in wooden covers, and having funny, tiny pictures for each letter of the alphabet, and beside each, a jingle. There were verses to be learned from the Bible, too. Patience held her primer up close to her nose and studied very diligently, but Peregrine's eyes wandered out of the window and toward ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... been seven years since Alec learned it, but the words were as familiar still as the letters of the alphabet. As Macklin's high-pitched voice reached them, Philippa joined in in a singsong undertone, and even Alec found himself unconsciously following the well-remembered ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... their greater practical sense, ancient virtue, and love of law and order, seem like our own people. It is with personal pride that we read of the valour and conquests of this mighty race, who used the alphabet we use, spoke and wrote with but little difference many of the words we speak and write, and with divine creative power evolved virtually all the forms of law which govern us today. To the Greek, art and literature were inextricably involved ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... California were brought here by them, and it was from the missions that Dr. Robert Semple borrowed the printing type, wherewith he printed the first newspaper in California, which appeared in Monterey in 1846, making the letter "w" by joining two vs as the Spanish alphabet ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... "might be very good children, if they were let alone; but the father is never easy when he is not making them do something which they cannot do; they must repeat a fable, or a speech, or the Hebrew alphabet, and they might as well count twenty for what they know of the matter; however, the father says half, for he prompts every other word."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 73. See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... in one or two other connections. We may add that the Bolos must have known something of our unwarlike and dissatisfied state of mind, for they left bundles of propaganda along the patrol paths, some of it in undecipherable characters of the Russian alphabet; but there was a publication in English, The Call, composed in Moscow by a Bolshevik from Milwaukee or Seattle or some other well known Soviet center on the home shore of ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... then, to give, as it were, the alphabet of the campaign, and I begin in this volume with the preliminaries to it—that is, its great political causes, deep rooted in the past; the particular and immediate causes which led to the outbreak of war; an estimate ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... repetition of its most melodious letter. Years of more or less familiarity with the English language had not been able to efface his racial penchant for the labial. One might naturally suppose that to compress a native alphabet of some one hundred and twenty-six letters into one of twenty-six would result in much confusion and some inexplicable preferences, but no one has ever been able to point out why the functions of the extra hundred should have to be assumed by the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... sitting position, and with signs and gestures we endeavoured to explain what we wanted him to do. Neither of us understood the deaf and dumb alphabet, but the alphabet was hardly necessary. With much pantomimic action we described Leith, the Professor, and the two girls, and Kaipi enjoyed himself immensely by waving his knife in front of One Eye's face to signify ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... 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 of Matrimony, in which more than one letter is used. In the former, the answer ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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
... not tell whether it was the superstition or the recent events themselves which weighed most in her mind, but, at any rate, she resumed, somewhat bitterly, a moment later: "M-1273! M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, and 1, 2, 7, 3 add up to thirteen. The first and last numbers make thirteen, and John Mansfield has thirteen letters in his name. I wish he had never worn the ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
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