Текст книги "Лексикология современного английского языка"

План и тексты для лексикологического анализа

План анализа

1. Contextual meaning (2–3 words).

2. Analysis into I. C. (one word).

3. Types of morphemic segmentability (complete, conditional, defective).

4. Types of morphemes (structurally: free, semi-free, bound; semantically: root, affixational).

5. Types of word-building (main, minor).

6. Phraseology (Smirnitsky: collocations, set expressions, idioms; Vinogradov: phraseological fusions, unities, collocations).

7. Synonyms (types, synonymic dominant).

8. Antonyms (root, derivational; conversives).

9. Homonyms.

10. Functional styles.

11. Variant of the English language.

Text 1

…Click-slam. Click-slam. One Magid, one Irie. Samad opened his eyes and looked in the rear-view mirror. In the back seat were the two children he had been waiting for: both with their little glasses, Irie with her wilful Afro (not a pretty child: she had got her genes mixed up, Archie’s nose with Clara’s awfully buck teeth), Magid with his thick black hair slicked into an unappealing middle-parting. Magid carrying a recorder, Irie with violin. But beyond these basic details, everything was not as it should be. Unless he was very much mistaken, something was rotten in this Mini Metro – something was afoot. Both children were dressed in black from head to toe. Both wore white armbands on their left arms upon which were painted crude renditions of baskets of vegetables. Both had pads of writing paper and a pen tied around their necks with string.

“Who did this to you?”

Silence.

“Was it Amma? And Mrs Jones?”

Silence.

“Magid! Irie! Cat got your tongues?”

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

“Millat, do you know what this is about?”

“Sboring,” whined Millat. “They’re just being clever, clever, snotty, dumb-bum, Lord Magoo and Mrs Ugly Poo.”

Samad twisted in his car seat to face the two dissenters. “Am I meant to ask you what this is about?”

Magid grasped his pen and, in his neat, clinical hand, printed: IF YOU WANT TO, then ripped off the piece of paper and handed it to Samad.

“A Vow of Silence. I see. You too, Irie? I would have thought you were too sensible for such nonsense.”

Irie scribbled for a moment on her pad and passed the missive forward. WE ARE PROSTESTING.

“Pros-testing? What are Pros and why are you testing them? Did your mother teach you this word?”

Irie looked like she was going to burst with the sheer force of her explanation, but Magid mimed the zipping up of her mouth, snatched back the piece of paper and crossed out the first s.

“Oh, I see. Protesting.”

Magid and Irie nodded maniacally.

“Well, that is indeed fascinating. And I suppose your mothers engineered this whole scenario? The costumes? The notepads?”

Silence.

“You are quite the political prisoners… not giving a thing away. All right: may one ask what it is that you are protesting about?”

Both children pointed urgently to their armbands.

“Vegetables? You are protesting for the rights of vegetables?”

Irie held one hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming the answer, while Magid set about his writing pad in a flurry. WE ARE PROTESTING ABOUT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL.

Samad growled, “I told you already. I don’t want you participating in that nonsense. It has nothing to do with us, Magid. Why are you always trying to be somebody you are not?”

There was a mutual, silent anger as each acknowledged the painful incident that was being referred to. A few months earlier, on Magid’s ninth birthday, a group of very nice-looking white boys with meticulous manners had turned up on the doorstep and asked for Mark Smith.

“Mark? No Mark here,” Alsana had said, bending down to their level with a genial smile. “Only the family Iqbal in here. You have the wrong house.”

But before she had finished the sentence, Magid had dashed to the door, ushering his mother out of view.

“Hi, guys.”

“Hi, Mark.”

“Off to the chess club, Mum.”

“Yes, M-M-Mark,” said Alsana, close to tears at this final snub, the replacement of “Mum” for “Amma”. “Do not be late, now.”

“I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIM IQBAL!” Samad had yelled after Magid when he returned home that evening and whipped up the stairs like a bullet to hide in his room. “AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!”

But this was just a symptom of a far deeper malaise. Magid really wanted to be in some other family. He wanted to own cats and not cockroaches, he wanted his mother to make the music of the cello, not the sound of the sewing machine; he wanted to have a trellis of flowers growing up one side of the house instead of the ever growing pile of other people’s rubbish; he wanted a piano in the hallway in place of the broken door off cousin Kurshed’s car; he wanted to go on biking holidays to France, not day-trips to Blackpool to visit aunties; he wanted the floor of his room to be shiny wood, not the orange and green swirled carpet left over from the restaurant; he wanted his father to be a doctor, not a one-handed waiter; and this month Magid had converted all these desires into a wish to join in with the Harvest Festival like Mark Smith would. Like everybody else would.

BUT WE WANT TO DO IT. OR WE’LL GET A DETENTION. MRS OWENS SAID IT IS TRADITION.

Samad blew his top. “Whose tradition?” he bellowed, as a tearful Magid began to scribble frantically once more. “Dammit, you are a Muslim, not a wood sprite! I told you, Magid, I told you the condition upon which you would be allowed. You come with me on haj. If I am to touch that black stone before I die I will do it with my eldest son by my side.”

Magid broke the pencil halfway through his reply, scrawling the second half with blunt lead. IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR!

(An extract from White Teeth by Zadie Smith)

Text 2

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.

Later, Henry will say, “Your girls flew well today.” The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one.

Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner. All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.

Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter’s badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king’s hand on his shoulder, Henry’s face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water’s edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.

“Sir, how are you not burned?” Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafe’s shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy – the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house – without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. “Cromwell has the skin of a lily,” the king pronounces. “The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.” Teasing him, they amble towards supper.

(An extract from Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel)

Text 3

The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas More’s death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the king’s business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and we’ve seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds. Instead – if there is no time for carving – the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Hans has joined them on the progress, and made a drawing of Anne the queen, but it did not please her; how do you please her, these days? He has drawn Rafe Sadler, with his neat little beard and his set mouth, his fashionable hat a feathered disc balanced precariously on his cropped head. “Made my nose very flat, Master Holbein,” Rafe says, and Hans says, “And how, Master Sadler, is it in my power to fix your nose?”

“He broke it as a child,” he says, “running at the ring. I picked him up myself from under the horse’s feet, and a sorry bundle he was, crying for his mother.” He squeezes the boy’s shoulder. “Now, Rafe, take heart. I think you look very handsome. Remember what Hans did to me.”

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer’s body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queen’s family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the king’s service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly.

Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England’s business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn’t laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, “Christ, I look like a murderer”; and his son Gregory said, didn’t you know? Copies are being made for his friends, and for his admirers among the evangelicals in Germany. He will not part with the original – not now I’ve got used to it, he says – and so he comes into his hall to find versions of himself in various stages of becoming: a tentative outline, partly inked in. Where to begin with Cromwell? Some start with his sharp little eyes, some start with his hat. Some evade the issue and paint his seal and scissors, others pick out the turquoise ring given him by the cardinal. Wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn’t like to meet him at the dark of the moon. His father Walter used to say, “My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he’ll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he’ll cut off your leg. But if you don’t cut across him, he’s a very gentleman. And he’ll stand anybody a drink.”

(An extract from Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel)

Text 4

Nobody can believe it.

The newspapers weren’t allowed to say which of our warships’d been hit at first, ?cause of the Official Secrets Act. But now it’s on BBC and ITV. HMS Sheffield. An Exocet missile from a Super Etendard smashed into the frigate and ‘caused an unconfirmed number of serious explosions? Mum, Dad, Julia and me all sat in the living room together (for the first time in ages), watching the box in silence. There was no film of a battle. Just a mucky photo of the ship belching smoke while Brian Hanrahan described how survivors were rescued by HMS Arrow or Sea King helicopters. The Sheffield hasn’t sunk yet but in the South Atlantic winter it’s just a matter of time. Forty of our men are still missing, and at least that many’re badly burnt. We keep thinking about Tom Yew on HMS Coventry. Terrible to admit it, but everyone in Black Swan Green felt relief that it was only the Sheffield. This is horrible. Till today, the Falkland’s been like the World Cup. Argentina’s got a strong football team, but in army terms they’re only a corned-beef republic. Just watching the task force leave Plymouth and Portsmouth three weeks ago it was obvious, Great Britain was going to thrash them. Brass bands on the quayside and women waving and a hundred thousand yachts and honkers and arcs of water from the fires’ips. We had the HMS Hermes, HMS Invincible, HMS Illustrious, the SAS, the SBS. Pumas, Rapiers, Sidewinders, Lynxes, Sea Skuas, Tigerfish torpedoes, Admiral Sandy Woodward. The Argie ships are tubs named after Spanish generals with stupid moustaches. Alexander Haig couldn’t admit it in public in case the Soviet Union sided with Argentina, but even Ronald Reagan was on our side.

But now, we might actually lose.

Our Foreign Office’ve been trying to restart negotiations , but the junta are telling us to get stuffed. We’ll run out of ships before they run out of Exocets. That’s what they’re gambling on. Who’s to say they’re wrong? Outside Leopoldo Galtieri’s palace in Buenos Aires, thousands of people are chanting, “We feel your greatness!” over and over. The noise is stopping me sleeping. Galtieri stands on the balcony and breathes it in. Some young men jeered at our cameras. “Give up! Go home! England is sick! England is dying! History says the Malvinas are Argentina’s!”

“Pack of hyenas,” Dad remarked. “The British’d show a bit of decorum. People have been killed, for heaven’s sake! That’s the difference between us. Will you just look at them!”

(An extract from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell)

Text 5

Moron, grinny-zitty as ever. His bumfluff’s getting thicker, mind.

His real name’s Dean Moran and I’d call him Dean if we were on our own but it would be gay to call him that now because names aren’t just names. My name is Jason Taylor, though I write poetry for the parish magazine under the name Eliot Bolivar ‘cos poetry is gay. It’s tough being 13 and having no real voice of my own. Sometimes I feel like I’m a 35-year-old man who’s trying too hard to be knowing. I was going to say self-conscious, but Hangman would get me.

I call it Hangman because that’s what I was playing when my stammer first started. I go and see a speech therapist now and sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s not and most times I just try and use another word. It’s Ss and Ds that catch me out.

It’s 1982 and I feel the need to namecheck as many things as possible so you’ll know I’m real. Epic. The Human League, 2000AD, Chariots of Fire, Space Invaders. I’m stuck up a tree watching as Tom Yew’s body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed on Debby Crombie. He’s home on leave from HMS Coventry. So you can take it as read he’s going to die in the Falklands in 100 pages time.

Maggot. You plonker, screamed the UnbornTwin, as the mad old woman from the woods appeared. And here’s the Badger. I seem to be spawning more voices. Help me, David, things are getting out of hand. Dad’s snorey-skonks and flobberglobbers’re impossible to sleep through. Thanks

They say nothing changes at Black Swan Green. Even the joke that there are no swans gets repeated. But things are changing at home. Dad’s being ever so polite to Mum these days and he’s given me a TV for my bedroom. Something’s wrong? Yet I still can’t tell him I’ve broken Grandad’s watch.

I get an invite to the vicarage. “I want to help you with your poetry,” said Madame Crommelynck. “If you are not truthful to the world, your world will stink of falseness.” Jesus, where did that come from? “Mme Crommelynck has been deported back to Germany,” says the vicar. Epic.

Except my cousin Hugo says no one says epic any more. I wouldn’t mind, but things are racing – I was going to say speeding – out of control. I can’t keep Dawn Madden out of my mind and she’s going out with Ross Wilcox who’s given me a kicking for being gay enough to go to the cinema with my Mum who’s got a job working in Cheltenham and I’ve found Ross’s wallet at the fairground and I don’t want to give it back to him ‘cos Dawn has just dumped him and he’s lost £600 of his dad’s money and I could buy another watch but then I give it back and Ross goes mad cos he sees Dawn snogging Grant Burch and he crashes a motorbike and loses a leg and it’s, like, all my fault.

Deep breath. Ground me, Maggot.

“Your mother and I are splitting up,” says Dad. “And don’t worry about the watch.”

I grind Neil Broase’s calculator in the vice. Suddenly I don’t care about the bullies any more and I’m moving home and Holly Deblin gives me my first ever snog. Tongues. I can sense it’s the end but there is no end.

(An extract from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell)

Text 6

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.” These “places” make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!

So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”

At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’hote of an Eighth street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.

That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.

One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.

“She has one chance in – let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”

“She – she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue. “Paint? – bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice – a man, for instance?”

“A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth – but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”

“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent. from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in– five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”

After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.

Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.

She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.

Johnsy’s eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting… counting backward.

“Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven;” and then “ten,” and “nine;” and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.

Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet, away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.

“What is it, dear?” asked Sue.

“Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”

“Five what, dear. Tell your Sudie.”

“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”

“Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were – let’s see exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”

“You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”

“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.”

“Couldn’t you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.

“I’d rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”

“Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I went to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.”

“Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move till I come back.”

(An extract from The Last Leaf by O. Henry)

Text 7

Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.

Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.

Old Behrman, with his red eyes, plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.

“Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermitdunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor lettle Miss Johnsy.”

“She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid old… old flibbertigibbet.”

“You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes.”

Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.