[Illustration: THE HANDWRITING OF THE GLACIERS AND THE ROMANS Here is an interesting relic of ancient days that will enable you to compare the chirography of the Old Men of the Mountain with that of the Romans. These are marks left by the masons on Roman walls. They show just what part each mason laid, so that if the wall proved defective the authorities would know who was responsible. ] All quite striking, isn't it, this strange kind of writing on the walls of time? As if, among the ruins that are all there is left of the fallen Roman Empire, we should in some heap of dust and crumbled stone find one of the very tablets on which Cæsar wrote his commentaries and there engraved in Cæsar's own hand: [Illustration: THIS STYLE IS CALLED FLUTING Looks like moulding, doesn't it? This is a piece of rock, and it was carved in that way by the glaciers with their tools of embedded stone. The deeper grooves were made where the rock was softer or where the glacier's chisels were of a particularly hard quality, such as flint or granite. ] "Cæsar, maximis bellis confectis, in hiberna exercitum deduxit." Can you translate that for us? (This to the High School Boy.) "As easy as anything," says he. "Cæsar, on completion of these great wars, led his army into winter quarters." And that same phrase might serve in Mr. Glacier's Commentaries too. For the glaciers of the Ice Age, after their great work was done, also went into winter quarters; melting back to the present snow-line in our mountains and the regions of eternal ice around the pole. HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY One of the most interesting stories of men's handwriting on the walls and how scholars, many centuries afterward, learned to read it, you will find in encyclopædias, histories, and other books under such headings as _Egypt_, _Assyria_, _Rosetta Stone_, and most of all under _Hieroglyphics_; a big word, but full of meat when once you've cracked the shell. Among other things, you will find that if it hadn't been for the Egyptians and other clever people of the long ago we would not have had our written language to read at all; on walls or anywhere else! If you had been an Egyptian, say 4,000 years ago, how many letters do you suppose you would have had to learn before you could have read well? About a thousand! But it wouldn't have been so hard as you think, for the Egyptian letters talked, so to speak. They told their own story much as did the picture words that told so much to the little Greeks. These Egyptian words, however--for they were words, or several words in one, rather than letters--were real pictures, and very good pictures, too. (See Chambers under "Hieroglyphics" for the little pictures.) Some of them were very simple. It wasn't hard to learn.