HIEROGLYPHICS I have read this chapter to a pretty neighbor who has approved of the preceding portions of the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but respect.

My neighbor classes this discussion of hieroglyphics as a fanciful flight rather than a sober argument.

I submit the verdict, then struggle against it while you read.
The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the stone age.

And the cave-men and women of our slums seem to be the people most affected by this novelty, which is but an expression of the old in that spiral of life which is going higher while seeming to repeat the ancient phase.
There happens to be here on the table a book on Egypt by Rawlinson that I used to thumb long ago.

A footnote says: "The font of hieroglyphic type used in this work contains eight hundred forms.