Grade 10: Unit 4

Innate refinement, instinctive elegance, and suppleness of wit give them their place on the only scale that counts, and these qualities make humble girls the peers of the grandest ladies.

Innate refinement, instinctive elegance, and suppleness of wit give them their place on the only scale that counts, and these qualities make humble girls the peers of the grandest ladies.

"Ah, a good homemade beef stew! There's nothing better..." she would visualize elegant dinners with gleaming silver amid tapestried walls peopled by knights and ladies and exotic birds in a fairy forest; she would think of exquisite dishes served on gorgeous china, and of gallantries whispered and received with sphinx-like smiles while eating the pink flesh of trout or wings of grouse.

"Ah, a good homemade beef stew! There's nothing better..." she would visualize elegant dinners with gleaming silver amid tapestried walls peopled by knights and ladies and exotic birds in a fairy forest; she would think of exquisite dishes served on gorgeous china, and of gallantries whispered and received with sphinx-like smiles while eating the pink flesh of trout or wings of grouse.

Madame Loisel was a great success. She was the prettiest woman there—resplendent, graceful, beaming, and deliriously happy.

She danced enraptured—carried away, intoxicated with pleasure, forgetting everything in this triumph of her beauty and the glory of her success, floating in a cloud of happiness formed by all this homage, all this admiration, all the desires she had stirred up—by this victory so complete and so sweet to the heart of a woman.

He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings—his head, his wife Maria's head, and the heads of three out of their four children.

He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings—his head, his wife Maria's head, and the heads of three out of their four children.

It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his bicycle back.

It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his bicycle back.

When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing.

But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds counted into his palms as ex-gratia award for the rebel money he had turned in.

Artifact: portable object made, modified, or used by people
• Rare artifacts often have great scientific, historic, and cultural value.
• Artifacts that are very rare, made of precious materials, or culturally significant may have high monetary value.

Iconography: system of symbolic images that conveys a subject, worldview, or concept
• Most cultures have iconography that is unique and recognizable.

Context: position and immediate surroundings of an artifact or other feature in the location where it is found
• An artifact's context helps archaeologists understand its function and importance.

Spain sent legions of marauding conquistadors up and down the Americas in a hallucinatory hunt, believing that gold was so abundant that chieftains rolled in it, washing away the glittering residue in their daily morning swims.

Nowhere has Peru's frenzy for gold been so fevered as in the mountains that surround Lake Titicaca. And nowhere has that fever been so intemperate as in a town tucked into a glacial aerie: La Rinconada, the highest human habitation in the world.

Even so, with all the antipathy a traveler might summon for a place so willfully despoiled, I found myself standing beside the road a good distance from La Rinconada, looking back at that promontory in wonder.

They are sitting down to dinner but they have to wait because the doorbell rings and a thin young boy begins to tell their father about a Sales Program he's completing for a scholarship to be Supervisor, and he holds up a filthy tattered little booklet and lifts also his desperate guile and heavily guarded hope, and the children's father says, No thank you, sorry but I can't help you out this time, and the boy goes away.

Their faces would soften with a kind of comfort in the authority of mother or father, with a kind of wonder at the needy callers.

And then would he reckon over the coins in the bag; toss up the bar, and catch it as it came down; sift the gold dust through his fingers; look at the funny image of his own face, as reflected in the burnished circumference of the cup; and whisper to himself, "O Midas, rich King Midas, what a happy man art thou!"

The stranger gazed about the room; and when his lustrous smile had glistened upon all the golden objects that were there, he turned again to Midas.

He lay in a very disconsolate mood, regretting the downfall of his hopes, and kept growing sadder and sadder, until the earliest sunbeam shone through the window, and gilded the ceiling over his head.

The palace clocks are stiff as coats of mail.

I did not know I loved their warring thorns
Until they flowered into spikes so hard
My blood made obdurate the rose's stem.

And my Queen,
Be armed against this gold paralysis,
Or you will starve and thinly bed alone,
And when you dream, a gold mine in your brain
Will have both eyes release their golden ore
And cry for tears they could not cry before.

The memoir would help preserve his legacy, of course—but as he saw it, there was only one way to pass along that sense of delight, that thrill of the hunt.

If you've been wise and found the blaze,
Look quickly down, your quest to cease,
But tarry scant with marvel gaze,
Just take the chest and go in peace.