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Her effusiveness embarrassed him. "You make too much out of nothing."

"Nothing?" Her eyes were misty with emotion. "I was something wild up in the air, and I could n't get hold of myself all alone, and you-you made me for a person."

"I cannot tell you how it affects me that in some way I do not understand I have been the means of bringing release to you. Of course," he added quickly, "I was only an instrument, not a cause. Just as a spade which digs the ground is not a cause of the fertility of the soil or of the lovely flowers which spring forth. I cannot get away from the poetic, the religious experience which has so unexpectedly overtaken me."

She listened to him in silent wonder. How different he was from the college people she had met at luncheon that day!

"I can't put it in words," she fumbled, "but I owe it to you, this confession. I can't help it. I used to hate so the educated! 'Why should they know everything, and me nothing?' it cried in me. 'Here I'm dying to learn, to be something, and they holding tight all the learning like misers hiding gold.""

§ 7

President Irvine did not answer. After a while he began talking in his calm voice of his dream of democracy in education, of the plans under way for the founding of the new school.

"I see it all!" She leaped to her feet under the inspiration of his words. "This new school is not to be only for the higher-ups by the higher-ups. It's to be for everybody-the tailor and the fish-peddler and the butcher.

And the teachers are not to be professors, talking to us down from their heads, but living people, talking out of their hearts. It 's to be what there never yet was in this country-a school for the people."

President Irvine had the sensation of being swept out of himself upon strange, sunlit shores. The bleak land of merely intellectual perception lay behind him. Her ardor, her earnestness broke through the habitual restraint of the Anglo-Saxon.

"Let me read you part of my lecture on the new school," he said, the contagion of her enthusiasm vibrant in his low voice. "Teachers, above all others, have occasion to be distressed when the earlier idealism of welcome to the oppressed is treated as a weak sentimentalism, when sympathy for the unfortunate and those who have not had a fair chance is regarded as a weak indulgence fatal to efficiency. The new school must aim to make up to the disinherited masses by conscious instruction, by the development of personal power for the loss of external opportunities consequent upon the passing of our pioneer days. Otherwise, power is likely to pass more and more into the hands of the wealthy, and we shall end with the same alliance between intellectual and artistic culture and economic power due to riches which has been the curse of every civilization in the past, and which our fathers in their democratic idealism thought this nation was to put an end to."

"Grand!" she cried, clapping her hands ecstatically. "Your language is a little too high over my head for me to understand what you 're talking about, but I feel I know what you mean to say. You mean, in the new

school, America is to be America, after all." Eyes tense, brilliant, held his. "I'll give you an advice," she went on. "Translate your lecture in plain words like they translate things from Russian into English or English into Russian. If you want your new school to be for the people, so you got to begin by talking in the plain words of the people. You got to feel out your thoughts from the heart and not from the head."

Her words were like bullets that shot through the static security of his traditional past.

"I shall never see the America which is to be," he said as he took her hand in parting; "it will not come in my day. But I have seen its soul like a free wild bird, beating its wings not against bars, but against the skies that the light might come through and reveal the earth to be."

She walked down the corridor and out of the building still under the spell of his presence. "Like a free wild bird! like a free wild bird!" sang in her heart.

She had nearly reached home when she became aware that tears were run

"Perhaps I can learn from you how ning down her cheeks, but they were to be simple."

"Sure! I feel I can learn you how to put flesh and blood into your words so that everybody can feel your thoughts close to the heart." The gesticulating hands swam before him like waves of living flame. "Stand before your eyes the people, the dumb, hungry people hungry for knowledge. You got that knowledge. And when you talk in that high-headed lecture language, it's like you threw stones to those who are hungry for bread."

Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts. There was a new light in her eyes, new strength in her arms and fingers, when she rose to go.

tears of a soul filled to the brimtears of vision and revelation. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the whole earth. She saw the soul beneath the starved, penny-pinched faces of the Ghetto. The raucous voices of the hucksters, the haggling women, the shrill cries of the children

all seemed to blend and fuse into one song of new dawn, of hope, of faith fulfilled.

"After all," she breathed in prayerful gratitude, "it is 'to the stars through difficulties.' A meshugeneh like me, a cook from Rosinsky's Restaurant burning her way up to the president for a friend!"

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Hys Majestie King Charles ye Second dictateth hys account of ye Battle of Worcester to hys Secretarie Sam Pepys, Esquire, who writeln it down in his lightnynge cypher.

Julius Cæsar's Stenographer

By JOHN ROBERT GREGG

HEN Cicero, the greatest of Roman orators and statesmen, in 63 B.C. rang for a stenographer, no dainty maid & came tripping to his desk with note-book and pencil ready to perpetuate the thoughts of the man whose every word was pondered by the intellectuals of that day. Instead, we can imagine a dignified and scholarly man, sandaled, tunicked, and togaed, coming forward with waxen tablets and styli, the writing-implements of the time, and sitting at his feet to take dictation. But the result was the same. The living words were transfixed for future generations to read and study.

Those who have struggled with the translation of Cæsar's "Commentaries" or Cicero's orations on the conspiracy of Catiline, now that they

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know the means by which this form of intellectual inquisition was made possible, will a thousand times wish that shorthand had never been invented.

Startling as it may seem, shorthand was widely used in the time of the Cæsars. Its beginning is a matter of conjecture; its evolution has extended over several centuries.

The first mention of an abbreviated system is in connection with the Roman poet Quintus Ennius, 200 B.C., who used a scheme of eleven hundred signs that he devised for the purpose of writing more swiftly than was possible by the ordinary alphabet. Doubtless some method of abbreviating words was used by the Hebrews, and also by the Persians, several hundred years before Christ, though there is no evidence that shorthand characters or other special symbols were employed.

The first definite and indisputable evidence of the use of shorthand is recorded by Plutarch, who mentions that in the debate on the Catilinian conspiracy in the Roman Senate in 63 B.C. the famous oration of Cicero was reported in shorthand.

The method of shorthand used was invented by Tiro, who was a freedman of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Like many of the slaves of that time, captives of other nations, he was highly educated, and on receiving his freedom from Cicero he adopted two thirds of his master's name and became Marcus Tullius Tiro. He then became Cicero's secretary and confidant.

When one remembers that the shorthand-writers of those days were without paper, pen, pencil, or ink, and possessed only a crude method of shorthand-writing, it is almost incredible that they could report anything. The writing was done on tablets that were covered with a layer of wax. The edges of the wax tablets were raised in order to allow their being closed without injury to the writing. These tablets were fastened together at the corners by wire, thus forming a kind of book. As many as twenty tablets could be so fastened. When the book consisted of two tablets only it was called a diploma, and the official appointments conferring public office were in that form; hence our word "diploma."

The instrument used for writing was a stylus, which was about the size of an ordinary pencil, the point being of ivory or steel, with the other end flattened for the purpose of smoothing the wax after a record had been made, in order that the tablet could be used again. It was with such instruments that Cæsar was stabbed to death.

Tiro must have possessed unusual skill as a shorthand-writer, for Cicero, in writing to a friend when Tiro was absent, complained that his work was delayed because, while he could dictate to Tiro in "periods," he had to dictate to others in "syllables." Cicero himself was a shorthand-writer, but evidently not a skilful one, as he writes to Atticus, "You did not understand what I wrote you concerning the ten deputies, I suppose, because I wrote you in shorthand."

In reporting the Roman Senate, it is said that Tiro stationed about forty shorthand-writers in different parts of the Curia, who wrote down on their tablets what they could. The transcripts were afterward pieced together into connected discourse. Even today, in the reporting in our own Congress, a somewhat similar method is used, except that the writers take notes in relays. It is stated that some of the Roman stenographers were trained to take down the first parts of sentences and others the closing words.

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The world is indebted to Tiro and his followers for the transmission to posterity of some of the finest bits of literature and some of the most effective orations of Roman civilization. By the grace of shorthand, we possess the opinions on the immortality of the soul of two of the famous men who lived before the Christian era. When we remember that in the days of Cicero and Cæsar the sayings of the famous intellectuals were passed on almost entirely by word of mouth, and were handed down in the same manner, the part that shorthand played in the preservation of thought was enormous. A knowledge of the Tironian notes

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Horace, Livy, Ovid, Martial, Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Julius Cæsar was a writer of shorthand, and the poet Ovid, in speaking of this, records, "By these marks secrets were borne over land and sea."

Titus Vespasian, the eleventh of the twelve Cæsars, was so proud of his skill as a shorthand-writer that he took part in contests for wagers and personally taught the art to his stepson.

Augustus Octavianus, the first of the Roman Emperors, was an expert writer of shorthand. During his reign he appointed three classes of stenographers for the Imperial Government. It is recorded that he taught shorthand to his grandchildren, which indicates the esteem in which he held it. By decree the Senate named the month of August after him. It will thus be seen that two of the months were named after men who wrote shorthand, the other being July, after Julius Cæsar, it being his birth month.

§ 3

With the rise of the early Christian Church and the demand for a record of the exact words of the relig

ious leaders of the day, the teaching and practice of the shorthand of Tiro received a new impetus. Pope Clement, in A.D. 196, divided Rome into seven districts and appointed a shorthandwriter for each. Cyprian, the famous bishop of Carthage, devoted much of his time to the elaboration of several thousand abbreviations to supplement the Tironian notes. These abbreviations were devoted for the main part to scriptural and proper names and to current phrases peculiar to the early Christians, thereby rendering the work "much more useful to the faithful," as he expressed it, but at the same time making the learning of shorthand much more difficult.

Certain recent historians have produced a good deal of evidence to show that the Sermon on the Mount was reported in shorthand by St. Luke. They base their assumption on the fact that shorthand was then a very fashionable and highly prized art, and it is reasonThe great orator and philosopher able to suppose that St. Luke mastered

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