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How does the account of Gulliver begin? (See A, B, p. 27.) How did Gulliver conceal his terror? Try to imagine how immense everything seemed to him. How did he appear to the family? Why did they laugh when he drank to the lady's health? Was he wise to ask the father to pardon the boy? In what ways did he show his courage? His politeness? Did the baby act as babies usually act? Does the conclusion deepen your realization of the size of Gulliver as compared with the Brobdingnagians?

SUGGESTIONS FOR ORAL AND WRITTEN ENGLISH
THEME SUBJECTS

Note the suggestions given in (A, B) on page 27 and write a story as if you were the Brobdingnagian small boy telling a boy friend your experience with Gulliver. Relate an imaginary account of yourself as a man of normal size traveling among people six inches high. Have a dwarf tell

the same story from his own point of view.

Use one of the following topics for a theme:

Gulliver's First Dinner at Brobdingnag.

An Experience with a Giant.

The Adventures of Hercules.

The Experience of Ulysses with the Cyclops.
Adventures in Search of the Golden Fleece.

An Adventure of a Knight at King Arthur's Court.
The Story of Jack the Giant Killer.

The Story of Red Riding Hood.

SUGGESTIONS FOR ADDITIONAL READINGS

A Voyage to Lilliput (from Gulliver's Travels, first four chapters). Jonathan Swift.

A Voyage to Brobdingnag (from Gulliver's Travels, first three chapters). Jonathan Swift.

Arabian Nights' Entertainments: History of Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp; History of Sinbad, the Sailor; History of Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers; History of the Enchanted Horse.

Legends Every Child Should Know. Hamilton W. Mabie.

Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe.

Greek Heroes. Charles Kingsley.

The Odyssey (particularly Ulysses's adventure with the Cyclops). George Herbert Palmer (translation).

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Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts. He was at one time editor of Harper's Magazine, also the author of many delightful essays and books of travel. See also:

Mrs. James T. Fields's Charles Dudley Warner.
Vedder's American Writers of To-day (Warner).

I BELIEVE in the intellectual, if not the moral, qualities of vegetables, and especially weeds. There was a worthless vine that (or who) started up about midway between a grape trellis and a row of bean poles, some three feet from each, but a little nearer the trellis. When it came out of the ground, it looked around to see what it should do. The trellis was already occupied. The bean pole was empty. There was evidently a little the best chance of light, air, and sole proprietorship on the pole. And the vine started for the pole, and began to climb it with determination. Here was as distinct an act of choice, of reason, as a boy exercises when he goes into a forest, and, looking about, decides which tree he will climb. And, besides, how did the vine know enough to travel in exactly the right direction, three feet, to find what it wanted? This is intellect. The weeds, on the other hand, have hateful moral qualities. To cut down a weed is, therefore, to do a moral action. I feel as if I were destroying sin. My hoe becomes an instrument of retributive justice. I am an apostle of Nature. This view of the matter lends a dig

1 From My Summer in a Garden, copyright 1870 and 1885, by Houghton Mifflin Company. This selection is used by permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of his works.

nity to the art of hoeing which nothing else does, and lifts it into the region of ethics. Hoeing becomes, not a pastime, but a duty. And you get to regard it so, as the days and the weeds lengthen.

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Observation. Nevertheless, what a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. The hoe is an ingenious instrument, calculated to call out a great deal of strength at a great disadvantage.

The striped bug has come, the saddest of the year. He is a moral double-ender, ironclad at that. He is unpleasant in two ways. He burrows in the ground so that you cannot find him, and he flies away so that you cannot catch him. He is rather handsome, as bugs go, but utterly dastardly, in that he gnaws the stem of the plant close to the ground, and ruins it without any apparent advantage to himself. I find him on the hills of cucumbers (perhaps it will be a cholerayear, and we shall not want any), the squashes (small loss), and melons (which never ripen). The best way to deal with the striped bug is to sit down by the hills, and patiently watch for him. If you are spry, you can annoy him. This, however, takes time. It takes all day and part of the night. For he flieth in darkness, and wasteth at noonday. If you

get up before the dew is off the plants, it goes off very early, you can sprinkle soot on the plant (soot is my panacea; if I can get the disease of a plant reduced to the necessity of soot, I am all right); and soot is unpleasant to the bug. But the best thing to do is to set a toad to catch the bugs. The toad at once establishes the most intimate relations with the bug. It is a pleasure to see such unity among the lower animals. The difficulty is to make the toad stay and watch the hill. If you know your toad it is all right. If you do not, you must build a tight fence round the plants, which the toad cannot jump over. This, however, introduces a new element. I find that I have a zoological garden on my hands. . . .

There is another subject which is forced upon my notice. I like neighbors, and I like chickens; but I do not think they ought to be united near a garden. Neighbors' hens in your garden are an annoyance. Even if they did not scratch up the corn, and peck the strawberries, and eat the tomatoes, it is not pleasant to see them straddling about in their jerky, high-stepping, speculative manner, picking inquisitively here and there. It is of no use to tell the neighbor that his hens eat your tomatoes: it makes no impression on him, for the tomatoes are not his. The best way is to casually remark to him that he has a fine lot of chickens, pretty well grown, and that you like spring chickens broiled. He will take them away at once.

The neighbors' small children are also out of place in your garden, in strawberry and currant time. I hope I appreciate the value of children. We should soon come to nothing without them, though the Shakers have the best gardens in the world. Without them the common school would languish. But the problem is, what to do with them in a garden. For they are not good to eat, and there is a law against making away with them. The law is not very well enforced, it is true; for people do thin them out with constant dosing, paregoric and soothing sirups, and scanty clothing. But I, for one, feel that it would not be right, aside from the law, to take the life even of the smallest child, for the sake of a little fruit, more or less, in the garden. I may be wrong; but these are my sentiments, and I am not ashamed of them. My plan would be to put them into Sunday schools more thoroughly, and to give the Sunday schools an agricultural turn; teaching the children the sacredness of neighbors' vegetables. I think that our Sunday schools do not sufficiently impress upon children the danger, from snakes and otherwise, of going into the neighbors' gardens.

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