They held a great meeting a king to select, And the kangaroo rose in a dignified way, And said, "I'm the one you should surely elect, For I can out-leap every beast here to-day." Said the eagle, "How high can you climb toward the sky?" Said the nightingale, "Favor us, please, with a song!" Said the hawk, "Let us measure our powers of eye!" Said the lion, "Come wrestle, and prove you are strong!" But the kangaroo said, "It would surely be best, In our choice of a king, to make leaping the test!" WONDERS OF THE ALPHABET. BY HENRY ECKFORD. SEVENTH PAPER. Great was the surprise of scholars, both Hindoo and European, when certain students of old languages claimed that the letters of the Sanskrit, the classical language of India, were originally derived from an alphabet, akin to the Ph[oe]nician, used by a great branch of the great race of peoples who are called Shemites, or Semites, after one of the sons of Noah. (The Jews, Arabs, Philistines, Hittites, Ph[oe]nicians, and Aramaeans are Semites.) Those students believe that the wonderful peninsula of India, which, as far back as traditions go, has been crowded with men of various colors and different tongues, received a Semitic alphabet under two forms by two different roads, and perhaps at periods far apart. They believe that there was a land road and a sea road. They trace one alphabet by land, through Bactria and Cashmere, from one fierce and intelligent nation to another; and they believe that they have traced a second alphabet from Arabia to India by way of the Red Sea. The nation that carried the latter alphabet is supposed to have been the Sabaeans, an ancient people of Arabia, who were once as powerful in the Southern seas as the Ph[oe]nicians, their kindred, were in the Mediterranean.