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Wardrop would go below from time to time, and pat the two rods where they lay, and they heard him singing hymns. Then his trouble of mind went from him, and at the end of the third day's idleness he made a drawing in chalk upon the deck, with letters of the alphabet at the angles.
The feeling that the average speaker has of his language is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more alternative letters.
As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging about your father and his money, tell me which three letters of the alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience if the strongest microscope ever made could find his conscience out? Shall I tell you them?" She held up her finger.
But their alphabet was lacking; they could utter only the thrilling language of love, which is not bound by such earthly things as signs and symbols. Yet was she utterly confident, and her demeanor rendered Rachel Craik more and more suspicious. Since the girl had scornfully disowned her kinship, the elder woman had not made further protest on that score.
If the alphabet were invited out to dine, what time would U, V, W, X, Y, and Z go They would go after tea. When was beef-tea first introduced into England? When Henry VIII dissolved the Pope's bull. What letter is the pleasantest to a deaf woman? A, because it makes her hear. When is love a deformity? When it is all on one side. Why is a mouse like hay? Why is a madman equal to two men?
His next production was 'Mercurie; or the Secret and Swift Messenger, a treatise on Cryptography or ciphers; curious contrivances whereby A can communicate with C without B's suspecting or understanding, by signs, gestures, parables, and transpositions of the alphabet: such as the writer looked at seemed to confirm the view that every cipher which depends on system, and not on an arrangement of a capricious kind, can be interpreted by an expert, a title to which he lays no claim.
Here and there, a few returned priests, in spite of the intolerant law and with the connivance of the local authorities, also a few scattered nuns, teach in a contraband fashion a few small groups of Catholic children; five or six little girls around a disguised Ursuline nun spell out the alphabet in a back room; a priest without tonsure or cassock secretly receives in the evening two or three youths whom he makes translate the De Viris.
He referred here to a syllabic alphabet which Alf had invented, and which he had amused himself by teaching to some of the natives, so that they might write down and read those few words and messages in their own tongue which formerly they had been wont to convey to each other by means of signs and rude drawings after the manner of most savages.
"Here we are enabled, at once, to discard the 'th, as forming no portion of the word commencing with the first 't'; since, by experiment of the entire alphabet for a letter adapted to the vacancy, we perceive that no word can be formed of which this 'th' can be a part. We are thus narrowed into t ee,
Again came the irregular raps 3, 4, 8, 6; then a pause, and 3, 4, 8, 7. "I think," said the authoress, "they must be numbers. Will the spirits," she said, "be good enough to aid us? Shall we use the alphabet?" "Yes," was rapped very quickly. "Are these numbers?" "Yes," again. "I will write them," she added, and, doing so, took up the card and tapped the letters.
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