&&000 USA SCHOOLBOOKS US908X.TXT 1990s 8TH GRADE first: 2 publishers: SF and MacDougal Littell later: 3 publishers Silver Burdett, HM1, and Mac/McGraw Hill ADDED US908HM2 10 July 2004 Xeroxed, then later scanned, ocr'd and edited by dph 22 June 2004 &&111 with what foresight with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern all, closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly-very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. =Ha!would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously-cautiously (for the hinges creaked)I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights, every night just at midnight, but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound' old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept. Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back-but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily. I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out "Who's there?" I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall. Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief-oh, no!-it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise. when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. someone would tell them what to do." As he had promised, President =Roosevelt acted swiftly to meet the crisis and restore confidence. During his first hundred days in office he pushed through Congress the most far-reaching legislative program in =American history. At the same time, =EleanorRoosevelt proved to herself and to an astonished nation of =Roosevelt watchers that she did not intend to be a conventional =WhiteHouse hostess. She broke with tradition when she announced that she would hold regular press conferences open to women reporters only an idea suggested by =LorenaHickok. They would be the first press conferences ever given by a First Lady, on the record, in the =WhiteHouse. Other presidential wives, shielded from the press, had refused even to grant interviews. =Eleanor believed that the nation's citizens had a right to know what the people in the =WhiteHouse were thinking and doing. She met with thirty-five "press girls' for the first time on March =6, just two days after =FDR's inauguration. The =WhiteHouse staff was flabbergasted by the =FirstLadvs easy informality. In her eagerness to get settled. =Eleanor pitched in and helped move furniture around. She insisted on running the little wood-paneled elevator herself, without waiting for a porter to run it for her. And she refused to be shadowed by =SecretService agents whenever she went out. "No one's going to hurt me," she said. "I simply can't imagine being afraid of often enough to be recognized. The two friends traveled as "ordinary tourists" without anyone realizing who they were. Early in her husband's administration, Mrs =Roosevelt made a surprise appearance that dramatized her resolve' to stay in touch with ordinary citizens. The year before, when =Herbert =Hoover was still president, thousands of unemployed war veterans had marched on =Washington, demanding that bonuses promised them in the future be paid immediately. =Hoover was so alarmed that he called out the =Army. Troops commanded by General =Douglas =MacArthur routed the jobless veterans with tear gas and burned their encampment . Shortly after =FDR took office, the bonus marchers returned to the capital. This time the government opened an old army camp to house the men and provided them with food and medical care. Even so, many people feared that violence would erupt again. Critics charged that the unemployed veterans were mechanically minded. Right then, as he ate, =Philip got it into his head that he would look inside the telephone hanging on the wall. He ate quickly and then used a screwdriver to pop off the plastic front of the telephone. "You're gonna get in trouble," =Leticia said, her mouth full and her face greasy from the sandwich. "No, I'm not," =Philip replied. "If it breaks, I'll just fix it. I have a mechanical mind." He strummed the bunched strands of red and yellow wires, then put his ear to the receiver. The telephone still worked. "See," he said when he dialed his best friend, =Ricky, and got =Ricky's mother, who answered, =Bueno. He hung up and said, "It ain't broke." His curiosity satisfied, =Philip replaced the face of the telephone and decided to open the back of the clock radio in his parents' bedroom. Ever since his father had knocked it over while putting a new light bulb in the lamp by the bed, the radio had hummed. Now =Philip would see what was wrong. He unscrewed the back and lifted the top, discovering a simple network of circuits and wires. There were also clots of dust and a mysterious toothpick lodged inside. He blew away the dust and used the end of his T-shirt to clean the comers. He was surprised at the tiny puddles of solder and the fish line device that changed the stations. The humming miraculously stopped. =Philip stood, hands on hips, feeling proud. "See, it don't buzz no more," he said to his sister. Leticia lowered her ear to the radio. The buzzing had indeed stopped. Perched on their parents' end table, along with the radio, was a bottle of moisturizing lotion with a pump. =Philip pressed the pump, and a yellowish lotion oozed into his hand. He rubbed it into his face, some of it sticking to his eyelashes. "The lotion works like this," =Philip started. "You see the pump-it works like gravity, like when astronauts jump on the moon. You probably don't understand. =Leti, because you're not mechanically minded." =Leticia looked at her brother with new respect. She had never heard talk like this. She pumped a dimple of lotion into one palm, pressed her hands together, and then rubbed it on her arms. Next =Philip unscrewed the hair dryer. He looked at the wires and the small motor encased in hard plastic. He explained to his awed' sister that an electric fire was created in the motor and then air was trapped in a chamber that exploded every two or three seconds. "That's how your head heats up," he reasoned. He flicked on the hair dryer, and =Leticia ran from the bathroom, her hands covering her head, screaming, "Don't burn my hair!" Feeling more ambitious. =Philip decided he would take apart the microwave oven. First he microwaved an ice cube and explained to =Leticia that the waves were radar that could zap water from a stone. "Go ahead and drink it." =Philip dared =Leticia as he shoved a cup of melted ice at her. Steam was rising from the near-boiling water. "No way!" =Leticia yelled. And you better not mess with the microwave. Mom will kill you." But it was too late. =Philip's screwdriver slipped and scraped off a piece of the imitation-wood facing. He decided to leave the microwave oven alone. "Well, it was getting too old," he said. "Some of the radar leaked out and hurt the paint." "Radar?" =Leticia asked. You're making this up." of an intimate conversation, =Momma persistently using the wrong verb, or none at all. "Brother and Sister =Wilcox is surely the meanest" "Is," =Momma? "Is"? Oh, please, not "is," =Momma, for two or more. But they talked, and from the side of the building where I waited for the ground to open up and swallow me, I heard the soft-voiced Mrs =Flowers and the textured voice of my grandmother merging and melting. They were interrupted from time to time by giggles that must have come from MrsFlowers (=Momma never giggled in her life). Then she was gone. She appealed to me because she was like people I had never met personally. Like women in English novels who walked the moors (whatever they were) with their loyal dogs racing at a respectful distance. Like the women who sat in front of roaring fireplaces, drinking tea incessantly from silver trays full of scones1° and crumpets." Women who walked over the "heath" and read morocco-bound books and had two last names divided by a hyphen. It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be =Negro, just by being herself. She acted just as refined as whitefolks in the movies and books and she was more beautiful, for none of them could have come near that warm color without looking gray by comparison. It was fortunate that I never saw her in the company of poor white folks. For since they tend to think of their whiteness as. an evenizer, I'm certain that I would have had to hear her spoken to commonly as =Bertha, and my image of her would have been shattered like the unmendable =Humpty-Dumpty One summer afternoon, sweet-milk fresh in my memory, she stopped at the Store to buy provisions. Another =Negro woman of her health and age would have been expected to carry the paper sacks home in one hand, but =Momma said, "Sister =Flowers, I'll send =Bailey up to your house with these things." She smiled that slow dragging smile, 'hank you, Mrs =Henderson. I'd prefer =Marguerite, though." My name was beautiful when she said it. "I have been meaning to talk to her, anyway." They gave each other age-group looks. =Momma said, "Well, that's all right then. Sister, go and change your dress. You going to Sister =Flowers's." The chifforobe was a maze. What on earth did one put on to go to Mrs =Flowers's house? I knew I shouldn't put on a Sunday dress. It might be sacrilegious. Certainly not a house dress, since I was already wearing a fresh one. I chose a school dress, naturally. It was formal without suggesting that going to Mrs =Flowers's house was equivalent to attending church. I trusted myself back into the Store. "Now, don't you look nice." I had chosen the right thing, for once. "Mrs =Henderson, you make most of the children's clothes, don't you?" "Yes, ma'am. Sure do. Store-bought clothes ain't hardly worth the thread it take to stitch them." "I'll say you do a lovely job, though, so neat. That dress looks professional." =Momma was enjoying the seldom-received compliments. Since everyone we knew (except Mrs =Flowers, of course) could sew competently, He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock. He was making four miles an hour, and he calculated that he would arrive at the forks at half past twelve. He decided to celebrate that event by eating his lunch there. The dog` dropped in again at his heels, with a tail drooping discouragement, as the man swung along the creek bed. The furrow of the old sled trail was plainly visible, but a dozen inches of snow covered the marks of the last runners. In a month no man had come up or down that silent creek. The man held steadily on. He was not much given to thinking, and just then, particularly, he had nothing to think about save that he would eat lunch at the forks and that at six o'clock he would be in camp with the boys. There was nobody to talk to, and, had there been, speech would have been impossible because of the ice muzzle on his mouth. So he continued monotonously to chew tobacco and to increase the length of his amber beard. Once in a while the thought reiterated itself that it was very cold and that he had never experienced such cold. As he walked along he rubbed his cheekbones and nose with the back of his mittened hand. He did this automatically, now and again changing hands. But, rub as he would, the instant he stopped his cheekbones went numb, and the his feet. Once, coming around a bend, he shied abruptly, like a startled horse, curved away from the place where he had been walking, and retreated several paces back along the trail. The creek he knew was frozen clear to the bottom-no creek could contain water in that arctic winter-but he knew also that there were springs that bubbled out from the hillsides and ran along under the snow and on top the ice of the creek. He knew that the coldest snaps never froze these springs, and he knew likewise -their danger. They were traps. They hid pools of water under the snow that might be three inches deep, or three feet. Sometimes a skin of ice half an inch thick covered them, and in turn was covered by the snow. Sometimes there were alternate layers of water and ice skin, so that when one broke through, he kept on breaking through for a while, sometimes wetting himself to the waist. That was why he had shied in such panic. He had felt the give under his feet and heard the crackle of a snow-hidden ice skin. And to get his feet wet in such a temperature meant trouble and danger. At the very least it meant delay, for he would be forced to stop and build a fire, and, under its protection, to bare carefully selecting the slaves that she would take with her. She had announced her arrival in the quarter by singing the forbidden spiritual"Go down, =Moses, 'way down to =Egypt Land" singing it softly outside the door of a slave cabin, late at night. The husky voice was beautiful even when it was barely more than a murmur borne on the wind. Once she had made her presence known, word of her coming spread from cabin to cabin. The slaves whispered to each other, ear to mouth, mouth to ear, "=Moses is here." "=Moses has come." "Get ready. =Moses is back again." The ones who had agreed to go North with her put ashcake and salt herring in an old bandanna, hastily tied it into a bundle, and then waited patiently for the signal that meant it was time to start. There were eleven in this party, including one of her brothers and his wife. It was the largest group that she had ever conducted, but she was determined that more and more slaves should know what freedom was like. She had to take them all the way to =Canada. The =FugitivSlaveLaw was no longer a great many incomprehensible words written down on the country's lawbooks. The new law had become a reality. It was =ThomasSims, a boy, picked up on the streets of =Boston at night and shipped back to =Georgia. It was =Jerry and =Shadrach, arrested and jailed with no warning. She had never been in =Canada. The route beyond =Philadelphia was strange to her. But she could not let the runaways who accompanied her know this. As they walked along she told them stories of her own first flight; she kept painting vivid word pictures of what it would be like to be free. But there were so many of them this time. She knew moments of doubt when she was half-afraid, and kept looking back over her shoulder, imagining that she heard the sound of pursuit. They would certainly be pursued. Eleven of them. Eleven thousand dollars' worth of flesh and bone and muscle that belonged to =Maryland planters. If they were caught, the eleven runaways would be whipped and sold South, but she, she would probably be hanged. They tried to sleep during the day but they never could wholly relax into sleep. She could tell by the positions they assumed, by their restless movements. And they walked at night. Their progress was slow. It took them three nights of walking to reach the first stop. She had told them about the place where they would stay, promising warmth and good food, holding these things out to them as an incentive to keep going. When she knocked on the door of a farmhouse, a place where she and her parties of runaways had always been welcome, always been given shelter and plenty to eat, there was no answer. She knocked again, softly. A voice from within said, "Who is it?" There was fear in the voice. She knew instantly from the sound of the voice that there was something wrong. She said, "A friend with friends," the password on the Underground Railroad. The door opened, slowly. The man who stood in the doorway looked at her coldly, looked with unconcealed astonishment and fear at the eleven disheveled runaways who were standing near her. Then he shouted. "Too many, too many. It's not safe. My place was searched last week. It's not safe!" and slammed the door in her face. The old lady herself came to the door. "How?," I said, "How is ?" She peered at me closely for a moment then laughed. "Oh I see who it is now. You mean =Peter, don't you, Mr =Herriot. Oh 'e's just grand. Come in and see 'im." In the little room the cage still hung by the window and =Peter the Second took a quick look at me then put on a little act for, my benefit; he hopped around the bars of the cage, ran up and down his ladder and rang his little bell a couple of times before returning to his perch. His mistress reached up, tapped the metal and looked lovingly at him. `You know, you wouldn't believe it," she said. "He's like a different bird." I swallowed. "Is that so? In what way?" "Well he's so active now. Lively as can be. You know he chatters to me all day long. It's wonderful what cutting a beak can do." added, "We'll bury her." I saw a weary smile cross my mother's face. "If she wanted to go back to the ranch then that's where we have to take her," =Daddy said. I hugged him and he, right in front of everyone, hugged back. No one argued. It seemed, suddenly, as though they had all wanted to do exactly what I had begged for. Grownups baffled me. Late that week the entire family, hundreds it seemed, gathered at the little =Catholic church in =Coalinga for Mass, then drove out to Arroyo =Cantua and buried =Grandma next to =Grandpa. She rests there today. My mother, father, and I drove back to =Oildale that afternoon across the scorching westside desert, through sand and tumbleweeds and heat shivers. Quiet and sad, we knew we had done our best. =Mom, who usually sat next to the door in the front seat, snuggled close to =Daddy, and I heard her whisper to him, "Thank you, =Charlie," as she kissed his cheek. =Daddy squeezed her, hesitated as if to clear his throat, then answered, "When you're family, you take care of your own." song. A =Remenzel didn't write it. =TomHilyer wrote it. "The man in that old car we passed?" "Sure," said Doctor =Remenzel. "=Tom wrote it. I remember when he wrote it." "A scholarship boy wrote it?" said =Sylvia. "I think that's awfully nice. He was a scholarship boy, wasn't he?" "His father was an ordinary automobile mechanic in North =Marston." "You hear what a democratic school you're going to, =Eli?" said =Sylvia. Half an hour later =BenBarkley brought the limousine to a stop before the =HollyHouse, a rambling country inn twenty years older than the =Republic. The inn was on the edge of the =WhitehillSward, glimpsing the school's rooftops and spires over the innocent wilderness of the =SanfordRemenzel Bird Sanctuary. =BenBarkley was sent away with the car for an hour and a half. Doctor =Remenzel shepherded had flung herself down to cry that afternoon. Every nerve in her had been twanging discordantly, but she couldn't cry. She could only lie there, her hands doubled up hard, furious that she had nothing to cry about. Not really. She was too big to cry just over father's having said to her, severely, "I told you if I let you take the chess set, you were to put it away when you got through with it. One of the pawns was on the floor of our bedroom this morning. I stepped on it. If I'd had my shoes on I'd have broken it." Well, he had told her that. And he hadn't said she mustn't ever take the set again. No, the instant she thought about that, she knew she couldn't cry about it. She could be, and was, in a rage about the way father kept on talking, long after she'd got his point: "It's not that I care so much about the chess set. It's because if you don't learn how to take care of things, you yourself will suffer for it. You'll forget or neglect something that will be really important, for you. We have to try to teach you to be responsible for what you've said you'll take care of. If we-" on and on. She stood there, dry eyed, by the bed that =Rollie had not crumpled and thought, I hope mother sees the spread and says something about =Rollie, I just hope she does. She heard her mother coming down the hall, and hastily shut her door. She had a right to shut the door to her own room, hadn't she? She had some rights, she supposed, even if she was only thirteen and the youngest child. If her mother opened it to say, "What are you doing in here that you don't want me to see?" she'd say-she'd just say But her mother did not open the door. Her feet went steadily on along the hall, and then, carefully, slowly, down the stairs. She probably had an armful of winter things she was bringing down from the attic. She was probably thinking that a tall, thirteen-year-old daughter was big enough to help with a chore like that. But she wouldn't say anything. She would just get out that insulting look of a grownup silently putting up with a crazy unreasonable kid. She had worn that expression all day; it was too much to be endured. Up in her bedroom behind her closed door the thirteen-year-old stamped her foot in a gust of uncontrollable rage, nonetheless savage and heart-shaking because it was mysterious to her. But she had not located =Rollie. She would be cut into little pieces before she would let her father and mother know she had lost sight of him, forgotten about him. They would not scold her, she knew. They would do worse; they would look at her. And in their silence she would hear, droning on reproachfully, what they had said when she had been begging to keep for her own the sweet, woolly collie puppy in her arms. How warm he had felt! Astonishing how warm and alive a puppy was compared with a doll! She had never liked her dolls much after she had held =Rollie, feeling him warm against her breast, warm and wriggling, bursting with life, reaching up to lick her face. He had loved her from that first instant. As he felt her arms around him his liquid, beautiful eyes had melted in trusting sweetness. And they did now, whenever he looked at her. Her dog was the only creature in the world who really loved her, she thought passionately. And back then, at the very minute when, as a darling baby dog, he was beginning to love her, her father and mother were saying, so cold, so reasonable, gosh, how she hated reasonableness! "Now, =Peg, remember that, living where we do, with sheep on the farms & &&000 USA schoolbooks [US908B.TXT] 1900S 8TH GRADE COMBINES SILVER BURDETT GINN; HM1; AND MACM/McGraw-Hill XEROXED, SCANNED AND EDITED BY DPH 24/5 June 2004 &&000 this is the second set of samples of US908B.txt Compare with results from US908a.txt IN A MERGED FILE &&111 it did before the =gussaksr erected their military bases and and hung all around her. She closed her tent flap and took out brought planes, snowmobiles, electricity, and jeeps to the =Arctic. her pot. In it she put a piece of fat from the bladder-bag and a As she thought about the gussaks she suddenly knew why scrap of sinew. She lit the sinew and a flame illuminated her the brown bear was awake. The =Americans' hunting season had tiny home. She took out the bone she was carving into a comb. begun! Her wolves were in danger! The =gussaks were paid to as she carved she saw that it was not a comb at all, but shoot them. A man who brought in the left ear of a wolf to the =Amaroq. The teeth were his legs, the handle his head. He was warden was rewarded with a bounty of fifty dollars. The bounty waiting to be released from the bone. Surprised to see him, she was evil to the old men at seal camp, for it encouraged killing carved carefully for hours and finally she let him out. His neck for money, rather than need. was arched, his head and tail were lifted. Even his ears had a Her father, =Kapugen , had considered the message. "I love you," they said. bounty the =gussaks' way of deciding that the =amarogs could not A bird called faintly in the darkness. =Miyax wondered what live on this earth anymore. "And no men have that right," he kind it was and what it was doing so far north at this date. Too would say. "When the wolves are gone there will be too many sleepy to think, she unlaced her boots, undressed, and folded her caribou grazing the grass and the lemmings will starve. Without clothes. The bird called from the edge of her sleeping skin. Hold the lemmings the foxes and birds and weasels will die. Their her candle above her head, she crept toward the door and passing will end smaller lives upon which even man depends, peered into the bright eyes of a golden plover. He was young, whether he knows it or not, and the top of the world will pass for he wore the splotched plumage of the juvenile and still had a into silence." trace of baby-yellow around his beak. He slumped against her =Miyax was worried. The oil drum she had seen when the skins. skua flew over marked the beginning of civilization and the end Gently she slipped her hand under his feet, picked him up, of the wilderness. She must warn her pack of the danger ahead. and brought him close to her. His black and gold feathers She had learned to say many things to them; but now, the most gleamed in the sputtering light. She had never beheld a plover important of all, the ear-twist or bark that would turn them so closely and now understood why =Kapugen had called them back, she did not know. "the spirit of the birds." The plover's golden eye and red nose How, she thought, do I shout "Go away! Go far, far away!" band made it look like one of the dancers in the Bladder Feast' She sang: "You are lost," she said. "You should be far from here. Perhaps in =Labrador. Perhaps even in your winter home on the Go away, royal wolf, plains of =Argentina. And so you are dying. You need insects and Go away, do not follow. meat. But I'm so glad you're here." Then she added, "I shall call I'm a gun at your head, you =Tomait, the bird spirit." When I pass the oil drum. She eased the bird inside her warm sleeping skin, cut off a Threads of clouds spun up from the earth and trailed across small piece of caribou meat, and held it out. Tomait ate the tundra. They marked the beginning of a white-out. =Miyax ravenously, then rested. She fed him once more, and then he changed her plans to travel that night, crept into her shelter, and tucked his head in his back feathers and went to sleep. watched the air turn white as the snow arose from the ground gladder Feast: an =Eskimo celebration in which dancers wear bright costume and masks that represent the spirits of animals. The woman said "Oh look! The poor little thing, it wants to come in. Maybe it's hungry. I'll give it some milk." Just as I expected! I had her. All I needed was to get one paw inside the door and However, it wasn't going to be all that simple. The man! He began to shout, roar, scrape his chair, and thump the table with his fists, bellowing that he hated cats and he wouldn't have one in the house. Then he went into all those boring cliches about how we were a nuisance, got into everything, clawed the furniture, and smelled up the place. He kept yelling, "Nol Nothing doing! If you've got to feed it, give it some milk in the barn and then get rid of it. But it doesn't come in here." "Oho!" I said to myself. "You'll want some dealing with, my friend, and I'm the one who knows how to do it." You may not believe this, but I was almost pleased with this opposition. It was a challenge. If there's anything that's fun to work over, it's a man who thinks he is a real cat hater. In the meantime, while these thoughts were going through my head, I kept falling off and climbing back onto the screen door, still crying heartbreakingly. The woman opened it and picked me off, saying to him, "Oh, don't make such a fuss, darling. I'll just give her some milk. we'll put her out afterwards." The point, you will have gathered from this, is that the more men rage, fuss, shout, and yell, the less attention one pays to them. For although he was still clamoring and protesting, where was I? Inside the door, lapping up milk out of a saucer. Once inside I knew exactly what to do, for my mother, who herself had a difficult person to deal with, had told me a great deal about men and how to handle them. I simply ignored him and played up to the woman, who was making all kinds of soft, cooing noises about me. Of course, the more she fussed over me the angrier he got until finally he shouted, "Okay now, that's enough! Come on, get it out of here." politics. It would take me a long while to explain." The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching =SquawCreek, which cut up the west half of the =Shimerdas' place and made the land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales. As we approached the =Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine colored grass that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill frame that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the drawbank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at =black =Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically. "Very glad, very glad!" she exclaimed. Immediately she pointed to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no good!" =Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after a while, Mrs =Shimerda; make good house." My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf. She made Mrs =Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our visit, and the =Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, and came to the conclusion that I had voted for =Homer and so had he. After class he didn't deny it, reminding me of what the teacher had said-we could vote for each other but didn't have to. The lower part of town was a collage of nationalities in the middle of which Miss =NettieHopley kept school with discipline and compassion. She called assemblies in the upper hall to introduce celebrities like the police sergeant or the fire chief, to lay down the law of the school, to present awards to our athletic champions, and to make important announcements. One of these was that I had been proposed by my school and accepted as a member of the newly formed =Sacramento =Boys Band. "Now, isn't that a wonderful thing?" Miss =Hopley asked the assembled school, all eyes on me. And everyone answered in a chorus, including myself, "Yes, Miss =Hopley." Parents who were summoned to Miss =Hopley's office and boys and girls who served sentences there knew that =NettieHopley meant business. The entire school witnessed her sizzling =Americanism in its awful majesty one morning at flag salute. All the grades, as usual, were lined up in the courtyard between the wings of the building, ready to march to classes after the opening bell. Miss =Shand was on the balcony of the second floor off Miss =Hopley's office, conducting us in our lusty singing of "My Country =tiz-a-thee." Our principal, as always, stood there like us, at attention, her right hand over her heart, joining in the song. Halfway through the second stanza she stepped forward, held up her arm in a sign of command, and called loud and clear: "Stop the singing." Miss =Shand looked flabbergasted. We were frozen with shock. Miss =Hopley was now standing at the rail of the balcony, her eyes sparking, her voice low and resonant, the words coming down to us distinctly and loaded with indignation. "There are two gentlemen walking on the school grounds with their hats on while we are singing," she said, sweeping our ranks with her eyes. "We will remain silent =Caroline had begun to imitate =BettyJean's singing of "=OHolyNight." It was almost perfect, just a fraction flatter and shakier than =BettyJean's voice had been, the o's and ah's parodies of =BettyJean's pretentious ones. She ended the performance with a mournful shriek more than a little off pitch and looked around, grinning for her family's approval. All the way through I had expected my parents to stop her, invoking, if nothing else, the nearness of the neighbors. But no one had. And now, she had finished and was waiting for our applause. It came in the form of a smile working at the firm corners of my father's mouth. =Caroline laughed happily. It was all she desired. Surely =Momma would protest. Instead she handed Grandma a cup to drink in her chair. "Here's your cocoa, Mother," she said. =Caroline and I went to the table for ours, =Caroline still smiling. I had a burning desire to hit her in the mouth, but I controlled myself. That night I lay in bed with an emptiness chewing away inside of me. I said my prayers, trying to push it away with ritual, but it kept oozing back round the worn edges of the words. I had deliberately given up "Now I lay me down to sleep" two years before as being too babyish a prayer and had been using since then the =Lord'sPrayer attached to a number of formula "God blesses." But that night "Now I lay me" came back unbidden in the darkness. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the =Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take. "If I should die." It didn't push back the emptiness. It snatched and tore at it, making the hole larger and darker. "If I should die." I tried to shake the words away with "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for behold, thou art with me. There was something about the idea of God being with me that made me feel more alone than ever. It was like being with =Caroline. She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even my friend =Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness. And his mother and grandmother did their share of worrying about him. But I had never caused my parents "a minute's worry." Didn't they know that worry proves you care? Didn't they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was worth something? I worried about them. I feared for my father's safety every time there was a storm on the Bay, and for my mother's whenever she took the ferry to the mainland. I read magazine articles in the school library on health and gave them mental physical examinations and tested the health of their marriage. I even worried about =Caroline, though why should I bother when everyone else spent their lives fretting over her? I longed for the day when they would have to notice me, give me all the attention and concern that was my due. In my wildest daydreams there was a scene taken from the dreams of =Joseph. =Joseph dreamed that one day all his brothers and his parents as well would bow down to him. I tried to imagine =Caroline bowing down to me. At first, of course, she laughingly refused, but then a giant hand descended from the sky and shoved her to her knees. Her face grew dark. "Oh, Wheeze," she began to apologize. "Call me no longer =Wheeze, but =SaraLouise," I said grandly, smiling in the darkness, casting off the nickname she had diminished me with since we were two. "Come and have lunch with me," he said. "And while we're eating, you can tell me all about it. Tell me your most exciting adventure and I'll write it up for the =SaturdayEveningPost. Every little bit helps." I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim. But no. And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out only after he has closed the door to the workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where imagination takes over and the person finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds. "Come along," =CSForester said to me. "Let's go to lunch. You don't seem to have anything else to do." As I walked out of the embassy side by side with the great man, I was churning with excitement. I had read just about everything he had written. I had, and still have, a great love for books about the sea. Now here I was about to have lunch with somebody who, to my mind, was pretty terrific. He took me to a small expensive =French restaurant somewhere near the =Mayflower Hotel in =Washington. wearing what T-shirt and tried to say something witty about each one. I must have cured my writer's block, because as soon as I wrote that first item I got a couple of other ideas. =Kitty told me she spent the summer at a theatrical camp and had the lead in Can Can. Since she was as out of it as I was, I thought I might as well help her out. I wrote, Can this =Kitty cancan? Ask the kids at West of =Broadway Theatrical Camp in =Libertyville, Illinois, who last summer cheered =KatherineWells's performance as a French chorus girl. I liked to read that one out loud because I love puns, alliteration, and stuff like that. One of the chem classes brewed up a concoction that made the whole school smell like a garbage dump. I found out a couple of names of the seniors in that class and wrote this item: Rumor has it that =AmyBloom and =BenGreer won the Creative Chemist Awards for the week. Their mixture of =Limburger cheese and =Ben's sweat socks, which we all had the pleasure of inhaling last week, has been purchased by the =GreenFlyCompany for a new bug spray. I used rumor just in case they wouldn't like the publicity. I didn't want to get sued. Tom gave me some jokes. They weren't very funny, but my deadline was coming up, and I was desperate. I put his name on this one: =Arnold is available again. Has been since his girl called, and he said, "Our going steady has gotten very monotonous. Every time a girl calls me up, it's you." The student council election campaigns were going on, and every morning we had an assembly to hear another candidate explain his platform and to watch his campaign committee put on a show. I decided to write a political item. I didn't know any of the candidates because &&000 USA Schoolbooks [US908HM.TXT] 8TH GRADE Houghton Mifflin 1991 The eye also contains about =125 million rods, mostly off to the sides. They can sense much fainter light than cones and let you see at night, but they do not sense colors, only black and white. Rods turn themselves off in bright light, and they take time to turn back on. This is why it takes your eyes a few minutes to get used to the dark, or dark adapt, if the lights go out suddenly. Once your eyes have dark adapted, a bright flash of light can leave you night blind until they can get used to the dark again. You might experience that if you are outside on a dark night and look at bright car headlights. Your eyes dark adapt enough to see in a minute or two, but scientists have found it takes thirty minutes to dark adapt fully. Night vision is a little different from day vision, and because we spend most of our time in the light, night vision can have some surprises. Red objects often look much darker in dim light than blue ones, because rods are more sensitive to blue light and less sensitive to red than cones. Another surprise is that faint objects are very hard to see if you look straight at them, because the center of the retina contains very few rods. For example, look at the whole night sky, and you can see many faint stars. But many of them will vanish if you try to look straight at them! They don't really go away, but the center of your eye can't see their faint light. You can make those faint stars reappear if you learn to aim your eyes a little distance from them. This is called "averting" your vision. Sometimes your eyes can get too much light. That's what happens when a flashbulb dazzles your eyes and you still seem to see the light for several seconds after the flash has stopped. The eye responds to light by producing chemicals, and if the light is very bright, the eye produces so much of the chemicals that it takes a long time for them to go away. A bright flash does not harm your eyes, because it is very short. Neither will a momentary glance at the sun. However, staring at the sun is dangerous, because it can focus enough solar energy to damage the sensitive cones in the center of your retina. You would still be able to see, but you would no longer have the fine vision needed to read. "That, though true, is beside the point," said Three. "The fact remains that the human masters are in terrible danger. This is a gigantic world and these =Jovians are greater in numbers and resources by a hundred times or more than the humans of the entire Terrestrial Empire. If they can ever develop the force field to the point where they can use it as a spaceship hull - as the human masters have already done - they will overrun the system at will. The question remains as to how far they have advanced in that direction, what other weapons they have, what preparations they are making, and so on. To return with that information is our function, of course, and we had better decide on our next step." "It may be difficult," said =Two. "The =Jovians won't help us." Which, at the moment, was rather an understatement. Three thought a while. "It seems to me that we need only wait," he observed. "They have tried to destroy us for thirty hours now and haven't succeeded. Certainly they have done their best. Now a superiority complex always involves the eternal necessity of saving face, and the ultimatum given us proves it in this case. They would never allow us to leave if they could destroy us. But if we don't leave then, rather than admit they cannot force us away, they will surely pretend that they are willing, for their own purposes, to have us stay." Once again, they waited. The day passed. The weapon barrage did not resume. The robots did not leave. The bluff was called. And now the robots faced the =Jovian radio-code expert once again. If the =ZZ models had been equipped with a sense of humor, they would have enjoyed themselves immensely. As it was, they felt merely a solemn sense of satisfaction. The Jovian said, "It has been our decision that you will be allowed to remain for a very short time, so that you may see our power for yourself. You shall then return to =Ganymede to inform your companion vermin of the disastrous end to which they will unfailingly come within a solar revolution." One made a mental note that a Jovian revolution took twelve Earthly years. =CrispusAttucks still towered over the captain, swinging his stick of wood and calling to his companions, "We're not afraid of them! Knock'em over. They dare not fire." Beside him stood =SamuelGray, the owner of a rope factory, who had led an attack on some of the soldiers a few days before. =Gray also shouted encouragement to the mob and said that the troops would not fire. A club sailed through the air, knocking aside a =British musket. Suddenly a hail of snowballs, stones, clubs, and sticks fell among the redcoats. The crowd raised as hout that rang through the streets, but above it rang a war whoop from Attacks, who grabbed a bayonet with one hand and at the same moment clubbed a soldier with his stick. The twelve muskets roared. =Attucks fell with two bullets in his chest, the first one fired by the sentry =Montgomery. =SamuelGray went down beside him. Both men died on the spot, almost at the feet of the soldiers. Stray shots killed =JonasCaldwell, a sailor who was standing in the middle of the street, and two other whites, =seventeen-year-old =SamuelMaverick and =PatrickCarr, both of whom fell as they were hurrying toward the scene. Six other civilians were wounded, but were to recover. The crowd fled, leaving the bodies behind, but as it grew and became noisier, it swarmed through the streets until it met Governor =ThomasHutchinson. The Governor calmed the people by speaking to them from the balcony of a building. He promised to arrest Captain =Preston and his men and to have the troops moved out of the city. The people then drifted away and returned to their homes. Strangely enough, the people of =Boston knew almost nothing about =CrispusAttucks, who was hailed as the first victim in the cause that was to become the &&000 beginning of a page 211 &&111 The light had been bent one way when it went through the first prism, but now it bent the opposite way when it went through the second prism. The colors separated as they went through the first prism and they came together again as they went through the second prism. When the light had passed through both prisms, what appeared on the wall was just a circle of white light. To =Newton, this was proof that the colors, mixed together, added up to white. But why should there be different colors of light? Why should they bend by different amounts in passing through a prism? To answer that question it might help to know what light is made up of, but no one in Newton's time could be sure. Still, there were two possibilities. It was possible that light might consist of a stream of very tiny particles, all moving very quickly in a straight line. It was also possible that light might consist of a stream of very small waves, all moving very quickly in a straight line. Scientists were familiar with the way bullets traveled in a straight line over short distances. They were also familiar with sounds that consisted of waves in the air. They could also see the waves move across the surface of a still pond if they dropped a pebble into it. One thing was very noticeable about waves, though. They could bend around obstacles. You can watch water waves do it. You know too that you can hear someone around a corner, so the sound waves must bend around that corner. On the other hand, bullets don't bend around a corner, and light doesn't either. If someone is around the corner, you can't see him. Light moves right past the edge of an obstacle, still going straight. For this reason, =Newton thought light had to consist of a stream of small, moving particles and not of waves. Not everyone agreed with him. There was a =Dutch scientist, =ChristianHuygens who thought light consisted of &&000 end of one page begin page 151 &&111 =Norman removed his glasses and closely regarded =Willie with his full attention. "Do you know what I was doing when you barged in here? I was running through a haunted castle being chased by a vampire who was very, very thirsty. If that isn't `doing,' I don't know what is." This led to =Norman's explaining the plot of =Bram =Stoker's =Dracula. =Willie, totally engrossed, sat on the floor listening to the tale of horror. =Norman was telling him about =Renfield and his daily diet of spiders and insects when a distant clicking sound averted his attention. "Probably a woodpecker," =Willie said, urging the other boy to get back to the story. =Norman stretched his neck closer to the sound. "If it is, it's the smartest woodpecker in history," =Norman said, straining to hear. Something in =Norman's expression caused =Willie to whisper, "What are you talking about?" =Norman swiftly signaled him to be quiet and silently crept toward the source of the tapping. =Willie, suddenly frightened for reasons he could not explain, followed closely. "What is it?" he asked, gripping his baseball bat. The tapping was louder now. "It's coming from the freight car." =Norman dropped to the floor, his body hunched against the steel door separating them from the other car. =Willie fell alongside him. "What is it?" he half leaded. =Norman took a pencil from his pocket and began scribbling furiously on the margins of the library book. =Willie noticed that he wrote with the rhythm of the clicking sound. Whenever the tapping stopped for a moment, so did =Norman's pencil. =Willie glanced at the jottings, but it was difficult to make out the words. He did make out one short phrase. "End is near." =Norman and the clicking stopped at the same time. &&000 end of page 151 start page 78 &&111 =Alexey thanked the crayfish joyfully. He returned to hide in the stable; at midnight, while the =BabaYaga was sleeping soundly, he saddled the shabby colt and rode off. Crossing back over the bridge spanning the river of fire, he found a lush green meadow nearby. Here he grazed the colt at sunrise for twelve mornings. By the twelfth morning, the colt had become a huge and powerful steed. With such a horse as this, he covered the roads back to the wizard's castle in hardly more time than is needed to tell of it. =Maria cried out with joy at the sight of =Alexey, but little time was spent in talk. They both mounted =Alexey's horse and at once rode off with the speed of the wind. But the wizard's horse once more faithfully reported =Maria's escape. Using whip and spurs, =Koschei flew after them. "You lazy bag of bones," shouted =Koschei. "Why don't you overtake them?" "The horse the prince rides is my younger brother," the wizard's horse replied, "but I will try." =Koschei applied the whip more viciously. As they drew closer to =Maria and =Alexey, the wizard lifted his great sword to strike. At that moment the steed =Alexey rode cried out to the other, "My brother, why do you serve such a cruel and wicked master? Toss him from your back and kick him sharply with your hooves!" =Koschei's horse heeded the advice of his brother. He threw his rider to the ground and lashed out with his hooves so fiercely that the wizard was forced to crawl back painfully to the castle on all fours, and he never emerged again. Maria mounted =Koschei's horse and they returned in triumph to their own kingdom. There they were welcomed with shouts of surprise and thanksgiving. Very soon after her return, =MariaMorevna again mounted =Koschei's horse, leading her army forth to rout the invaders in the west. And =Koschei's horse served her faithfully ever after. &&000 &&000 USA SCHOOLBOOKS [US907HM2.TXT] PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN 7TH GRADE 1990 XEROXED FROM BROCKPORT, SCANNED, OCR'D AND EDITED BY DPH 10 July 2004 &&111 chance is there for a guy like =EddieBrown or somebody like that coming down to see me in this town?" "You have to remember that =EddieBrown's the big shot," I said, "the great =Yankee scout." "Sure," the kid said. "I never even saw him, and I'll never see him in this place. I have an idea that if they ever ask =Dall about me he keeps knocking me down." "Why don't you go after =Dall?" I said. "I had trouble like that once myself, but I figured out a way to get attention." "You did?" the kid said. "I threw a couple of balls over the first baseman's head," I said. "I threw a couple of games away, and that really got the manager sore. I was lousing up his ball club and his record. So what does he do? He blows the whistle on me, and what happens? That gets the brass curious, and they send down to see what's wrong." "Is that so?" the kid said. "What happened?" "Two weeks later," I said, "I was up with =Columbus." "Is that right?" the kid said. "Sure," I said, egging him on. "What have you got to lose?" "Nothing," the kid said. "I haven't got anything to lose." "I'd try it," I said. "I might try it," the kid said. "I might try it tonight if the spot comes up." I could see from the way he said it that he was madder than he'd said. Maybe you think this is mean to steam a kid up like this, but I do some strange things. "Take over," I said. "Don't let this guy ruin your career." "I'll try it," the kid said. "Are you coming out to the park tonight?" "I wouldn't miss it," I said. "This will be better than making out route sheets and sales orders." It's not much of a ball park in this town-old wooden bleachers and an old wooden fence and about four =hundred people in the stands. The first game wasn't much either, with the home club winning something like =8 to =1. This made the cyclone so furious it didn't know where it was going. It raced across =Arizona. It dug in its toes as it went and tore a gulley through the heart of the mountains. This put =PecosBill in a worse fix than ever. He not only had to dodge the original mountains the cyclone had picked up and the =thousands of trees swirling in every direction, but now the air was becoming so full of dust and pieces of rock that he had to blow with all his might before he could take a full breath. His only safety lay in his dodging so fast that the cyclone couldn't get its eyes on him. If it ever had found out where he really was, for a minute, it would have buried him under a mighty pile of earth and rocks. =Pecos was just beginning to think he couldn't last much longer when the cyclone came to the same conclusion. A busted broncho couldn't have felt worse. And no matter what the cyclone did, it just naturally couldn't get rid of =PecosBill. Just then, however, it had another bright idea. It would rain out from under him! Now as soon as =Pecos saw what was happening he said to himself: "This is the same tactics a broncho uses when he rears over on his back. The only thing left for me to do now is to jump." The water beneath him was falling in torrents and regular waterspouts. So fast was the downfall that the water rushed through the great gully that the cyclone had just cut between the mountains, and quick as a wink made the =GrandCanyon of the =Colorado. =PecosBill began to look hard in every direction to see where he'd better jump. If the sky beyond the edge of the cyclone hadn't been clear, he wouldn't have known in the least where he was, for by this time he was a thousand feet above the limit of the very highest clouds. Beneath him lay huge piles of jagged rock and he couldn't help remembering how =OldSatan looked after he had been dragged down from the top of =Pike'sPeak. So he turned his eyes in other directions. =Pecos did not for a minute doubt his own ability to grow a complete new skeleton if he had to. But he didn't want to waste kid had a lemonade, and I told him a few stories and he turned out to be a real good listener. "But what do you do now, Mr. Franklin?" he said after a while. "I sell hardware," I said. "I can think of some things I'd like better, but I was going to ask you how you like playing in this league." "Well," the kid said, "I suppose it's all right. I guess I've got no kick coming." "Oh, I don't know," I said, "I understand you're too good for this league. What are they trying to do to you?" "I don't know," the kid said. "I can't understand it." "What's the trouble?" "Well," the kid said, "I don't get along very well here. I mean there's nothing wrong with my playing. I'm hitting .365 right now. I lead the league in stolen bases. There's nobody can field with me, but who cares?" "Who manages this ball club?" "=AlDall," the kid said. "You remember, he played in the outfield for the =Yankees for about four years." "I remember." "Maybe he is all right," the kid said, "but I don't get along with him. He's on my neck all the time." "Well," I said, "that's the way they are in the minors sometimes. You have to remember the guy is looking out for himself and his ball club first. He's not worried about you." "I know that," the kid said. "If I get the big hit or make the play he never says anything. The other night I tried to take second on a loose ball and I got caught in the run-down. He bawls me out in front of everybody. There's nothing I can do." "Oh, I don't know," I said. "This is probably a guy who knows he's got a good thing in you, and he's looking to keep you around. You people lead the league, and that makes him look good. He doesn't want to lose you to =KansasCity or the =Yankees." "That's what I mean," the kid said. "When the =Yankees sent me down here they said, `Don't worry. We'll keep an eye on you.' So =Dall never sends a good report on me. Nobody ever comes down to look me over. =Rip! =RipVanWinkle! =RipVanWinkle! =Rip's dog barks offstage; thunder rumbles. =Rip peers anxiously in the direction of the sounds, then jumps back in astonishment.) Why, what are those fellows doing up here? =Rip steps further back as four sailors enter, followed by =HendrikHudson. All wear old-fashioned clothing; =Hudson wears a plumed hat. First sailor carries a large water keg. Second sailor carries a sack of mugs; third and fourth sailors carry ninepins and balls. =RIP nervous, but ready to help: Here, let me hold that! Takes keg and sets it down. By thunder, that's heavy! Why are you carrying a water keg all the way up the mountain? =FIRSTSAILOR gruffly: It's =Hudson River water, man-the-best in the world. We've not tasted it for many a year. =HUDSON to second sailor: You there, pour out some water, it's been a long climb. Second sailor hands out mugs. =Hudson takes two, hands one to =Rip. You, friend, have a mug with us and join the game! Third and fourth sailors set up the ninepins. =RE: Thank you, Captain. Drinks and smacks his lips. Ah, this is the best water I've ever tasted, though I drank from the =Hudson River only this morning. Must be improved when you carry it so far. I'm still lightheaded, though, so I won't join the game just watch. =Rip yawns. Sailors bowl noisily. =Rip sits down near left curtain, then lies down slowly. Getting sleepy just for a minute or two lies down just out of sight. This allows =Rip as old man to take his place unseen. =HUDSON smiling after =Rip: Just for a minute or two -right, men? Sailors chortle quietly, gather up belongings, and leave; laughter and thunder trail off into silence. Lights dim and =8'o out. In a minute, lights brighten. =Rip as old man Yawns, then slowly gets up. Clothing is same as before, but looks old and ragged. He has a long white beard. &&000