IN THE PATH OF THE ALPHABET. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: ‘Frances D Jermain’] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IN THE PATH OF THE ALPHABET AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE ANCIENT BEGINNINGS AND EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN ALPHABET BY FRANCES D. JERMAIN --------------------- FORT WAYNE, IND. WILLIAM D. PAGE, PUBLISHER 1906 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright, 1906 BY S. P. JERMAIN Published in December Fort Wayne [Publishers logo] Indiana ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PREFACE. In one of the closing days of August, 1905, the author of this work, FRANCES D. JERMAIN, received the summons of her Maker to join the Silent Majority. The call came suddenly, finding her in the full possession of her ever remarkable intellectual powers, and with the ambition for much yet to do. For nearly twenty-five years, she had been at the head of the Toledo Public Library, in the upbuilding of which she was ever the inspiration and the guiding spirit. With more than the ordinary capacity for organization and the practical, she planned and carried out the working details of all notable improvements, in that thoroughly modern library. Others, who took up the work from which she retired about a year before her death, will carry it forward with that devotion and capacity which it should inspire; but they will but build additions to the edifice which she reared. Her death brought forth a remarkable outpouring of voluntary tributes to her worth and work. From these has come the realization that by her death Toledo has lost one whose influence upon its intellectual life was the most potent and far reaching of any citizen it has ever lost. Living and working nobly in public as in her ideally perfect domestic life, her loss is profoundly felt. Political administrations came and went, party triumphs and party defeats lived out “their little day” and are long since forgot; but year after year, until a quarter of a century had nearly gone, this brave and learned little woman ruled, with gentle power and kindly wisdom, the destinies of the Toledo Public Library.