Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" Chapters 11-20

I don't think anybody in Maycomb'll begrudge me a client, with times this hard."

"Gentle breeding," he continued, when I had found and scratched it, "and that you should try to live up to your name--' Atticus persevered in spite of us: "She asked me to tell you you must try to behave like the little lady and gentleman that you

"You know he wouldn't bother you, you know you ain't seared of Atticus."

In the frosty December dusk, their cabins looked neat and snug with pale blue smoke rising from the chimneys and doorways glowing amber from the fires inside.

Business was excellent when Governor William Wyatt Bibb, with a view to promoting the newly created county's domestic tranquility, dispatched a team of surveyors to locate its exact center and there establish its seat of government.

We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose.

Mayella's hostility, which had subsided to grudging neutrality, flared again.

They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours.

The varmints had a lean time of it, for the Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child.

It aggravates 'em.

Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet.

It was plain that Aunty thought me dull in the extreme, because I once heard her tell Atticus that I was sluggish.

I wanted to stay and explore, but Calpurnia propelled me up the aisle ahead of her.

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land t

Judge Taylor was not the kind of figure that ever evoked pity, but I did feel a pang for him as he tried to explain.

Giant monkey-puzzle bushes bristled on each corner, and between them an iron hitching rail glistened under the street lights.

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attit

Although her fits had passed off, she was in every other way her old self: when Sir Walter Scott became involved in lengthy descriptions of moats and castles, Mrs. Dubose would become bored and pick on us:
"Jeremy Finch, I told you you'd live to re

As he read along, I noticed that Mrs. Dubose's corrections grew fewer and farther between, that Jem had even left one sentence dangling in mid-air.