Page:Great thoughts for little thinkers.djvu/98

78 If you are nine years old, try and think back more than two hundred times as long as you have lived, and that will take you back to the time of Christ. I know it is very hard for you little folks to understand how long one hundred years is, and of course it is a great deal harder for you to think how long one thousand years is, though perhaps you know how to write it on your slates. So I will tell you another way which will help you to imagine how long a time has passed since people began to learn to write.

We do not know exactly when it was, but I suppose it was about forty-five hundred years ago, or, as we generally say, four thousand five hundred years. Now if you should count all the stars in the sky,—the bright ones, and the far-away ones that look so faint we can hardly see them, you would find that there were not so many stars as there are years since that early time when men first made the wonderful discovery that they could write down their thoughts.