Yo-ho! Past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages, and barns, and people going home from work. Yo-ho! Past donkey chaises drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses whipped up at a bound upon the 5 little watercourse and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yo-ho! By churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial grounds about them, where the graves are green and daisies sleep 10 for it is evening on the bosoms of the dead. Yo-ho! Past streams in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock fences, farms, and rickyards; past last year's stacks, cut slice by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, 15 old and brown. Yo-ho! Down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yo-ho! Yo-ho! Yo-ho! Among the gathering shades, making of no account the reflection of the trees, but scampering on 20 through light and darkness, all the same, as if the light of London fifty miles away were quite enough to travel by, and some to spare. Now, with a clattering of hoofs and striking out of fiery sparks, across the old stone bridge, and down again into the shadowy road, and through the 25 open gate, and far away, into the world. Yo-ho! See the bright moon! High up before we know it, making the earth reflect the objects on its breast like water hedges, trees, low cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps, and flourishing young slips, have all grown vain upon a 30 sudden, and mean to contemplate their own fair images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle, that their quivering leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak; trembling does not become him; and he watches himself in his stout old burly steadfastness without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown gate, ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed, swings to and fro before its glass s like some fantastic dowager: while our own ghostly likeness travels on, through ditch and brake, upon the plowed land and the smooth, along the steep hillside and steeper wall, as if it were a phantom hunter. Yo-ho! Why, now we travel like the moon herself. 10 Hiding this minute in a grove of trees; next minute in a patch of vapor; emerging now upon our broad, clear course; withdrawing now, but always dashing on, our journey is a counterpart of hers. Yo-ho! A match against the moon. The beauty of the night is hardly felt when day comes 15 leaping up. Two stages, and the country roads are almost changed to a continuous street. Yo-ho! Past market gardens, rows of houses, villas, crescents, terraces, and squares, and in among the rattling pavements. Yo-ho! Down countless turnings, and through countless mazy 20 ways, until an old innyard is gained, and Tom Pinch, getting down quite stunned and giddy, is in London. "Five minutes before the time, too!" said the driver, as he received his fee from Tom. 1. Tom Pinch traveled by the fast night coach to London, in the days before railroads. Tell what he saw, and make sketches. 2. Explain: grays, boot, yo-ho, chaises, paddock, dowager, rickyards, brake, crescents. 3. Charles Dickens (1812-1870), an English novelist, is famous for his humor and for the marvelous characters he has created. Many of his books attack or laugh at abuses and prejudices of his time. ODE TO A BUTTERFLY BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON The poet watches the butterfly and speaks to it, guessing in a fanciful way at its origin, commenting on its way of life, and thinking of the symbolic meaning that people in all ages have associated with it. HOU spark of life that wavest wings of gold, THO Thou songless wanderer mid the songful birds, With nature's secrets in thy tints unrolled Through gorgeous cipher, past the reach of words, 3 Yet dear to every child In glad pursuit beguiled, Living his unspoiled days mid flowers and flocks and herds! Thou winged blossom, liberated thing, Irrevocably free, Hovering at will o'er their parental bowers? 15 Or is thy luster drawn from heavenly hues 20 Then lend those tints to thee, On thee to float a few short hours, and die? Birds have their nests; they rear their eager young, And flit on errands all the livelong day; Each field mouse keeps the homestead whence it sprung; Seeking thine airy food, The sweetness spiced on every blossomed spray. The garden one wide banquet spreads for thee, O daintiest reveler of the joyous earth! A second draft would drug thee past all mirth. Thy calm eyes never close, Thou soberest sprite to which the sun gives birth. And yet the soul of man upon thy wings His emblem of the new career that springs Of immortality. Symbol of life, me with such faith endow! 1. What color was the butterfly that the poet watched? does he imagine it to be in the second stanza? In the third? does he say about its habits in the fourth stanza? In the fifth? What 2. What are the four stages in the life of a butterfly? The Greeks represented Psyche, the soul, with butterfly wings. Why? Express the meaning of the last stanza in your own words. 3. Use these words in sentences of your own: cipher, fostering, imbues, blazonry, satiety, orgy, sprite, arrest, symbol. 4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was an American writer of essays and biography. 2C IN THE DESERT By A. W. KINGLAKE The following sketch vividly describes an English traveler's impression of the desert country that lies between Jerusalem and Cairo. Mr. Kinglake had only an interpreter, two Arabian attendants and two camels in his little caravan. Eothen, the title of the volume from which this selection is extracted, is a Greek word meaning "From the East." NCE during this passage my Arabs lost their way among the hills of loose sand that surrounded us, but after a while we were lucky enough to recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a sheik, the 5 head of a family that actually dwells at no great distance from this part of the desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a matchlock, and of this he was inordinately proud, on account of the supposed novelty and ingenuity of the contrivance. We stopped, and sat down and To rested awhile, for the sake of a little talk. There was much that I should have liked to ask this man, but he could not understand Dthemetri's language, and the process of getting at his knowledge by double interpretation through my Arabs was tedious. I discovered, 15 however (and my Arabs knew of that fact), that this man and his family lived habitually for nine months of the year without touching or seeing either bread or water. The stunted shrub growing at intervals through the sand in this part of the desert enables the camel mares to yield a 20 little milk, and this furnishes the sole food and drink of their owner and his people. During the other three months |