But if you should stop your cross line just before you come to the other, and skip it, beginning again on the other side, your picture would be smoother and the surface of the brick less uneven. You would succeed still better if you should not try to draw continuous lines, but should indicate them with a series of dots made by dabbing the soft brick with a corner of the iron nail. Now, imagine the Hudson to be the Euphrates, and yourself a Babylonian of ten thousand years ago, and the nail a little, smooth, square-pointed piece of copper, iron, tin, or silver, and the pictures conventional signs representing the various sounds of the language, and you would be writing cuneiform. The old Babylonians, in writing, engraved soft bricks with regular and evenly placed dabs. These hardened quickly under the hot sun of Mesopotamia, or were baked in ovens, and so preserved the inscribed characters. Very often a coat of soft clay was wrapped about the original brick, and the same inscription made on the outside. This was done to prevent forgeries, and to make it easier to restore the meaning, if part of the brick were destroyed or lost. Whole libraries of these strange books have been found under the ruins of the palaces of the old kings of Assyria. Still other libraries are lying there waiting for their discoverer. Did you ever try to make an alphabet of your own? I can distinctly remember inventing one, with a favorite sister, when I was about seven years old. Great was our diligence while at work on it, and great was our secrecy! We used to hide it away so carefully that it was easy to forget about it for weeks at a time. We never learned it well enough to write the simplest sentences in it off-hand,—and for a very good reason: We had too recently learned an alphabet infinitely better than any that a child could think out—one which had been tested and changed and improved by ages of use. I do not doubt that many other children have tried to construct private systems of writing. It has never been uncommon for men to attempt to use secret alphabets. In this respect, the ancient people of Asia somewhat resembled children; and thousands of alphabets and syllabaries were invented in those old days. It is rare, however, that one has been handed down, and only when the people for whom it was devised had a much poorer system or none at all. [Illustration: A “TREE ALPHABET.”] Sequoiah, an intelligent Cherokee Indian, contrived more recently a syllabary of eighty-five signs, comprising all the sounds in his language, using the English alphabet as a basis on which to form his characters. This syllabary is in use to-day by the Cherokees, and books and newspapers are printed in it. Botanists have given the name, Sequoiah, to the gigantic trees of California, in perpetual memory of his genius. [Illustration: SPECIMENS OF OLD ASIATIC ALPHABETS. (SEE NEXT PAGE.)]