Of course the alphabet he used did not spring up suddenly. It was handed down from the early times of the Phoenicians, and gradually became so changed in most of the letters that you would hardly believe they had ever been the same as the Phoenician letters. Writers of it were so careless, or so proud of being able to read and write when the mass of their neighbors were ignorant, that, neglectfully or intentionally, they allowed many letters to become almost like one another. In the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages, it is hard to tell a number of the letters apart. In order to distinguish them, later writers devised a set of dots, like the dot over our small i. The same difficulty occurred among the Hebrews, whose wise men seemed to enjoy making writing hard to write and to read. Another reason why Arabic is hard to make out is because many of the letters change their forms according as they stand alone (unconnected), or stand at the beginning of a word (initial), or in between two other letters (connected) or at the end of a word (final). Think of having to distinguish the same letter under four different forms! What a bother to the children of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians as they sit tailor-fashion, or kneel patiently on the floor, their shoes left outside the threshold, while the school-master flourishes his rod over their puzzled noddles, or raps the soles of their tired little feet! Now Arabic letters and Hebrew, too, if you try to trace them back to Phoenician, are found to have passed through the hands of a people who occupied the high lands of Asia Minor, where the two great "rivers of Babylon," the Euphrates and the Tigris, begin to run their course. This land was called Aram and the ancient language spoken there, the Aramaic. Between Phoenician and Aramaic the connection is close. The Aramaic took the place of the Phoenician language, when the Phoenicians were edged out of Palestine westward over the Mediterranean. So we see that Arabic, which looks so strange and is so elegant and fantastic when embroidered on banners or traced on tiles or written on the beautiful mulberry-leaf paper of the Orient, really uses, in the main, the same alphabet that looks so plain and simple on the page you are reading! [Illustration: PERSIAN SENTENCE.]