is nonsense.  What we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing.  Take the letter M, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three.  The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand.  I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet.”

    I said:  “There is this objection:  the characters are so slightly
    different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is
    seldom that two can read each other’s notes.”

    “You are talking of stenographic reporting,” he said, rather warmly. 
    “Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet. 
    It is perfectly clear and legible.”

    “Would you have it in the schools, then?”

    “Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic
    purposes, but only for use in writing to save time.”

    He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article
    on the subject.

    November 3.  He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking
    what a fool he had been in his various investments.

“I have always been the victim of somebody,” he said, “and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do.  Never asking anybody’s advice—­never taking it when it was offered.  I can’t see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing.”  I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the ‘Letters from the Earth’, and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds.  He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn’t be identified because it had lost its tag.

    Somewhat on the defensive I said, “But we must admit that the so-
    called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive.”

He answered, “Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it.  The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.  And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.  The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.

“I have been reading Gibbon’s celebrated Fifteenth Chapter,” he said later, “and I don’t see what Christians found against it.  It is so mild—­so gentle in its sarcasm.”  He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin’s father, “Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians.”

    “I was glad to find and identify that saying,” he said; “it is so
    good.”