Unit 3: Vocabulary from Readings 1

I would, in the same letter or in a subsequent one, ask him a question outside the scope of his book, which was where I personally might find a pond, or a stream.

What, for example, was this noisome sounding substance called cheesecloth, and what do scientists do with it?

So also was any book about the sea—as though danger or even fresh air were a child’s prerogative—or any book by Charles Dickens or Mark Twain.

Consequently one had read, exasperated often to fury, Pickwick Papers, Désirée, Wuthering Heights, Lad, a Dog, Gulliver’s Travels, Gone With the Wind, Robinson Crusoe, Nordhoff and Hall’s Bounty trilogy, Moby-Dick, The Five Little Peppers, Innocents Abroad, Lord Jim, Old Yeller.

In fact, it was a plain truth that most books fell apart halfway through. They fell apart as their protagonists quit, without any apparent reluctance, like idiots diving voluntarily into buckets, the most interesting part of their lives, and entered upon decades of unrelieved tedium.

Marriages among the nobility and royalty were arranged not for love, but for practical reasons—to add land holdings, to strengthen the prestige and power of families, to cement an alliance of nations against a common enemy.

Her deepest desire was to assure them of peace and prosperity.

A directive from the pope’s office decreed that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth would not be regarded as a sin.

A song composed by William Byrd at the time suggests how ominous the news of a monarch’s execution was...

But she spared the lives of their wealthy leaders so that they might enrich her, either by buying their pardons or by forfeiting their lands.