constantly almost at blows with Kappa in the debatable land, and _per
contra_ it would itself have dropped its campaign against Lambda (if
indeed it is more dignified than petty larceny) for converting _molis_
to _mogis_: in fact lawless confusion generally would have been nipped
in the bud. And it is well to abide by the established order; such
trespasses betray a revolutionary spirit.

Now our first legislators--Cadmus the islander, Palamedes, son of
Nauplius, or Simonides, whom some authorities credit with the
measure--were not satisfied with determining merely our order of
precedence in the alphabet; they also had an eye to our individual
qualities and faculties. You, Vowels of the jury, constitute the first
Estate, because you can be uttered independently; the semi-vowels,
requiring support before they can be distinctly heard, are the second;
and the lowest Estate they declared to consist of those nine which
cannot be sounded at all by themselves. The vowels are accordingly the
natural guardians of our laws.

But this--this Tau--I would give him a worse designation, but that is
a manifest impossibility; for without the assistance of two good
presentable members of your Estate, Alpha and Upsilon, he would be a
mere nonentity--he it is that has dared to outdo all injuries that I
have ever known, expelling me from the nouns and verbs of my
inheritance, and hunting me out of my conjunctions and prepositions,
till his rapacity has become quite unbearable. I am now to trace
proceedings from the beginning.

I was once staying at Cybelus, a pleasant little town, said to be an
Athenian colony; my travelling companion was the excellent Rho, best
of neighbours. My host was a writer of comedies, called Lysimachus; he