"Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... Wilson, with Pleasure in her Face, I am glad to see you, Billy wants you sadly, for he has learned all 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 ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • 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
... 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 trifling error ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... 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
... 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. ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... 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
... 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 remarkable ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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 |
