My Antonia: Book I

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.

No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.

Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum.

As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other.

The tunes were either very lively or very doleful, and he sang words to some of them.

That hour always had the exultation of victory...

A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance.

She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again.

His shirt was hanging open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell horribly.

His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous, unfriendly expression.

This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows penned him in his cave.

When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odors of that cave.

Grandmother always talked, dear woman; to herself or to the Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was naturally taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper that I used to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence.

I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.