"You bet!" squealed the boy, delighted at the compliment. "See me take that old fellow over there!"
"No, no!" exclaimed the old gentleman, hastily. "Try it on the old woman I was sitting with. She has boys of her own, and she won't mind."
"Can you hit the lady for the gentleman, Johnny?" asked the fond parent.
Johnny drew a bead and landed the pellet on the end of the old woman's nose. But she did mind it, and, rising in her wrath, soared down on the small boy like a blizzard. She put him over the line, reversed him, ran him backward till he didn't know which end of him was front, and finally dropped him into the lap of the scared mother, with a benediction whereof the purport was that she'd be back in a moment and skin him alive.
"She didn't seem to like it, Puddin'," smiled the gentleman, softly. "She's a perfect stranger to me, but I understand she is a matron of truants' home, and I thought she would like a little fun; but I was mistaken."
And the old gentleman sighed sweetly as he went back to his seat.
The Alphabet.
The discovery of the alphabet is at once the triumph, the instrument and the register of the progress of our race. The oldest abecedarium in existence is a child's alphabet on a little ink-bottle of black ware found on the site of Cere, one of the oldest of the Greek settlements in Central Italy, certainly older than the end of the sixth century B. C. The Phœnician alphabet has been reconstructed from several hundred inscriptions. The "Moabite Stone" has yielded the honor of being the most ancient of alphabetic records to the bronze plates found in Lebanon in 1872, fixed as of the tenth or eleventh century, and therefore the earliest extant monuments of the Semitic alphabet. The lions of Nineveh and an inscribed scarab found at Khorsabad have furnished other early alphabets; while scarabs and cylinders, seals and gems, from Babylon and Nineveh, with some inscriptions, are the scanty records of the first epoch of the Phœnician alphabet. For the second period, a sarcophagus found in 1855, with an inscription of twenty-two lines, has tasked the skill of more than forty of the most eminent Semitic scholars of the day, and the literature connected with it is overwhelming. An unbroken series of coins extending over seven centuries from 522 B. C. to 153 A. D., Hebrew engraved gems, the Siloam inscription discovered in Jerusalem in 1880, early Jewish coins, have each and all found special students whose successive progress is fully detailed by Taylor. The Aramæan alphabet lived only for seven or eight centuries; but from it sprang the scripts of five great faiths of Asia and the three great literary alphabets of the East. Nineveh and its public records supply most curious revelations of the social life and commercial transactions of those primitive times. Loans, leases, notes, sales of houses, slaves, etc., all dated, show the development of the alphabet. The early Egyptian inscriptions show which alphabet was there in the reign of Xerxes. Fragments on stone preserved in old Roman walls in Great Britain, Spain, France, and Jerusalem, all supply early alphabets.
Alphabets have been affected by religious controversies, spread by missionaries, and preserved in distant regions by holy faith, in spite of persecution and perversion. The Arabic alphabet, next in importance after the great Latin alphabet, followed in eighty years the widespread religion of Mohammed; and now the few Englishmen who can read and speak it are astonished to learn that it is collaterally related to our own alphabet, and that both can be traced back to the primitive Phœnician source.