Now Chinese is a queer language. All its words are only one syllable long. But the sounds in the Chinese language are not very many, some four hundred and sixty-five at most, and their written language contains about eighty thousand pictures, each picture representing a thing or idea. And these pictures must be committed to memory. This is hard work, and not even the wisest Chinese professor can learn them all. But now comes a difficulty. For, of course, where there are so many words and so few sounds, many different words have to be called by the same sound. How then are they to tell, when several different things have exactly the same name which of them is meant? [Illustration: REBUS-PICTURES FROM THE OLD CHINESE, SHOWING THE BEGINNINGS OF PICTURE-WRITING. 1. A Month. (From a picture of the moon.) 2. The Eye. 3. A Horse. 4. An Ax. 5. Rain. 6. Face. 7. A Dragon. 8. Bamboo. 9. Rhinoceros. 10. Dawn. (From the rising sun.)] We have such words. For instance, there is Bill, the name of a boy; and bill, the beak of a bird; there is bill, an old weapon, and bill, a piece of money; there is bill, an article over which legislatures debate, and bill, a claim for payment of money; besides bills of exchange, bills of lading, and so forth. But Chinese is full of such words of a single syllable, _yen_, for instance, which, like bill, means many very different things. So they chose a number of little pictures, and agreed that these should be used as "keys." The Chinese "keys" were used like the Egyptian "determinative signs," of which I told you. Each "key" meant that the sign or signs near which it stood belonged to some large general set of things, like things of the vegetable, mineral, or animal kingdom, forests, mines, or seas, air, or water, or of persons, like gods or men. It was like the game called Throwing Light, in which you guess the article by narrowing down the field until certain what it is. But there Chinese writing stopped short, thousands of years ago. There it is to-day. There are now two hundred and fourteen of these "keys," and, by intense application, Chinamen learn to use their method with surprising quickness and success.