But now suppose you were an Egyptian and you wanted to write a letter telling somebody how pleased you were about something--a nice new book an uncle had sent you, for instance--the proper picture-word to use would be a lady beating a tambourine. She is pleased--that's why she is beating the tambourine, just as a small boy claps his hands when he says, "Oh, goody, goody!" So this picture-word came to be used to express "joy" or "pleasure" over anything. These are just some samples to show you what interesting things even such formidable words as "hieroglyphics" are when you make friends with them. But now, to get back to Nature's handwriting and the nature myths connected with it, what do you know about this Vulcan, who left so much of his manuscript in the rocks? The ancients thought of him as a worker in metals. Don't you think they would have, been quite sure of it if they had known about the dikes and the palisades of the Hudson, and Fingal's cave, with their remarkable iron-like columns of cooled lava? But he was an artist in metals, too, and a mechanical engineer, it seems. Do you remember about those two statues of beautiful women that he made of pure gold, and how they walked about with him wherever he went? And the brazen-footed bulls of Ætes, that filled the air with their bellowings and from their nostrils blew flame and smoke?[56] [Footnote 56: I wonder if Vulcan could have been thinking of locomotives--what we sometimes call "iron horses"--when he made those bulls. Do you suppose?] The Greeks probably didn't know about such "art metal" work as the palisades--certainly they didn't know about the Hudson River or Fingal's Cave--but they had Vulcan (Hephæstus they called him) doing all sorts of other art-metal things. There was the famous shield he made for Achilles, for instance. Homer takes several pages just to tell about the different figures on it and what they meant.[57] [Footnote 57: The Iliad.] Why do you suppose a temple was erected on Mount Etna? (What kind of a mountain is it?) Wouldn't it be strange if we could make hard coal out of soft? Vulcan does that sometimes with these dike strokes of his.[58] [Footnote 58: The International Encyclopedia.] The International will also tell you why dike rock is usually so solid and tough, and what the crystal people have to do with making it so. The Britannica (28: 188) tells how, in the walls of volcanoes Vulcan wrote out the hint for making re-enforced concrete which is so important a feature of modern architectural engineering. Look about on the rock-beds in the stone quarry and see if you can't find some of the writing of that Older Cæsar with his queer stone stylus. Probably the men in the quarry will have wondered how these scratches came there and you can tell them.