You have traced your letters back through the Irish missionaries to the Christians of Rome; but how did they come to Rome? You must know that among the great and renowned cities founded by the Phoenicians in Greece was Chalkis, a town in the island of Euboea. This island is close to the mainland of Greece, and its inhabitants are called Boeotians. Now the Athenians, who considered themselves very smart people, used to make all manner of fun about the stupidity of the Boeotians. But just why the Boeotians were thought very stupid folk, unless through jealousy or rivalry, I do not see, for one of the greatest poets of the world, called Pindar, was a Boeotian, and many famous generals, artists, architects, painters, and writers came from the ranks of this so-called stupid folk. And for all the fun they liked to make of these island people, the rest of Greece, including Athens, very likely had to come to the Boeotians for the alphabet. But you are not to suppose that the Phoenicians came to Euboea in the flourishing days of Athens, when the marvelous sculptors lived. It was long before. And the Latins of Italy, in their turn, took their letters from the Greek-Phoenicians of Chalkis long, long before Rome became a famous town. And it was because of great wars and the attacks of Asiatic nations that the people who had the best alphabet came to Europe at all. The Phoenicians were driven out of Asia Minor by the armies of other nations, which, under different names, are mentioned in the Bible, and perhaps among these were the Jews, in whose language the Bible has come down to us. It is more than probable that the ambition of great nations still farther to the eastward, drove the nearer nations of Syria upon the Phoenicians, who held the sea coast. But there was another inducement. The Phoenicians became very rich from their trading voyages; and also, I fear, from their plundering and kidnapping of slaves, for the Mediterranean was the haunt of buccaneers until the Romans frightened pirates into some kind of peaceableness. Even in this century it was necessary for the United States to send a fleet against the pirates that sailed from ports in Northern Africa. The riches of the Phoenician towns must have tempted the neighboring tribes to attack them. At any rate, having already made many settlements elsewhere, the Phoenicians began to give way more than a thousand years B. C., and to take refuge in their old or new colonies. Some old Greek traditions tell how Kadmus, a mighty leader and a very wise man in all the arts and sciences, came over from Asia and taught the Boeotians letters. In Phoenician the word Kadmus means the East-man, while the word Europe, which gradually was applied to a vast extent of land, a continent, at first belonged only to the land just across from the island of Euboea, on the other side of the narrow strait called Euripus, and means, in Phoenician, the West-land. So when