Daddy Long-Legs – B1 الإنجليزية للقراءة

He asked if they still kept doughnuts in a yellow crock with a blue plate over it on the bottom shelf of the pantry—and they do! He wanted to know if there was still a woodchuck’s hole under the pile of rocks in the night pasture—and there is! Amasai caught a big, fat, gray one there this summer, the twenty-fifth great-grandson of the one Master Jervie caught when he was a little boy.

I called him “Master Jervie” to his face, but he did n’t appear to be insulted. Julia says that she has never seen him so amiable; he ’s usually pretty unapproachable. But Julia has n’t a bit of tact; and men, I find, require a great deal. They purr if you rub them the right way and spit if you don’t. (That is n’t a very elegant metaphor. I mean it figuratively.)

We ’re reading Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal. Is n’t it amazing? Listen to this: “Last night I was seized by a fit of despair that found utterance in moans, and that finally drove me to throw the dining-room clock into the sea.”