In the earliest known Runic alphabet, the letters do not stand in the order of our letters; and they differ so greatly in other ways from the ordinary Greek alphabet, that it is probable they were borrowed long before the Christian era, and afterward became greatly changed. This Runic alphabet was called the “Futhorc,” from the first six letters, ᚠᚢᚦᚯᚱᚴ—F, U, TH, O, R, C. The third rune, ᚦ (TH), which came from the Greek Δ, _delta_, or D, survived in English literature until the last century, and is occasionally used to-day when people wish to write in an old-fashioned style. And they are apt to make a curious mistake in its pronunciation. The rune ᚦ remained in Irish and Anglo-Saxon for the sound TH, and in English it was preserved longest in the word “THE,” because that word occurs very often, and it was easier to write one letter than two. But in the course of time it came to be mistaken for Y; and although our ancestors knew better than to pronounce it like Y, their descendants do not, but usually give this apparent Y the sound of the real Y, making YE’s out of all the THE’s. They do not know that this is a survival of a rune almost to the present generation. The fifth rune of the “futhorc” is our R, and the sixth is our K without the tail. The Goths, Angles, and Scandinavians used twenty-four such runes or closely similar letters. You will notice that the Goth, like an unskillful schoolboy who carves his initials on wood, and is bothered by the circle of the O, has solved the difficulty by the bold move of cutting one downward and two cross strokes. Sometimes, however, the O was made by four strokes forming a lozenge ᛜ. They usually cut their down strokes across the grain; and they gave all their cross lines a slant, in order not to bury the point of the knife too deep, and splinter the wood, in cutting with the grain. That is the reason that the cross lines of the letters are rarely horizontal. [Illustration: THE BUZEO TORQUE.[4]] Some of our words that are in constant use can be traced back to this period. The word book was originally the same as the word beech, and reminds us of the time when our forefathers carved their records on beech-wood or beech-bark. The similarity of the two words has remained much closer in German; _Buch_ (book) being almost exactly the same as _Buche_ (beech). To sing from a stave is the same as to sing from a staff, because in runic writing the old chants were noted down with a knife on sticks or pieces of bark, and read from these by the singers. The Ojibway Indians, though they had not an alphabet like the runes, until recently had similar staves which they brought out when they chanted their songs; certain marks on the wood served to remind them of what they were to sing.