The Egyptians, you remember, had two kinds of writing: one called hieroglyphs, used mainly on monuments, for sentences of sacred history, names of kings, and short prayers; the other called hieratic, used on papyrus paper, chiefly for general and quicker writing. Both these terms signify that writing was sacred and connected with the priests. Religion entered very largely into the life of the people of Egypt, and the priests, who formed the most powerful class, held all the learning, and, before the Greeks flourished, were the wisest men in the world. The differences between the rough little sketches that formed the letters of the hieratic or swift hand and the laborious pictures called hieroglyphs, arose originally, and kept growing greater and greater, because of the different materials used in making them. It was natural to work very slowly and carefully on the hieroglyphs which were carved on royal monuments; while the scribes who wrote the hieratic characters on smooth papyrus with a reed pen and thick ink were obliged to disregard the smaller angles and finer outlines, and were satisfied if their work conveyed the meaning they intended. There is a fantastic and not inelegant writing used by the Burmese, a people to the north-east of India, and south of China. This script is very rounded and is made up of fine lines. The letters have been found to belong to an alphabet that looks entirely different; and the difference arose from the custom of writing on palm-leaves with a fine needle. It was difficult to make the plain up-and-down strokes without splitting the leaf, so these strokes were made in curves in circles and half circles. [Illustration: PORTION OF THE BURMESE ALPHABET.] The alphabet of the Goths, before and about the time they embraced Christianity, was formed on a contrary system. All the strokes were straight, either up and down, or crosswise, or slanting. Many persons have thought this arose because the Goths lacked a feeling for grace and beauty. But that was not the reason. When these forefathers of ours invented or borrowed their runes, and later when they borrowed a true alphabet from the Greeks, they cut their letters on sticks of wood or on smooth lengths of bark. Most boys know by experience how difficult it is to cut a round O on a smooth stick on account of the grain of the wood. This led to peculiar shapes in the letters.