Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

  

   John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is one of the best loved novellas of all time. Two drifters - small, shrewd George and huge, simple-minded Lennie - get work on a ranch, planning to raise enough money to get a place of their own and live off the land, if George can save his childlike, bull-strong friend from getting into trouble. A powerfully moving story of friendship, Of Mice and Men is a simply told masterpiece.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Extract

     A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees – willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

     There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

   In the din and stink that is Cannery Row a colourful blend of misfits – gamblers, whores, drunks, bums, and artists – survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Doc, who owns the laboratory, is the fount of all generosity and wisdom. Everybody wants to do something nice for Doc: the trouble is, he always ends up paying. Packed with invention and joie de vivre, Cannery Row is Steinbeck's high-spirited tribute to his native California.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (Extract)

Cannery Row

     Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine can­neries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabi­tants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

     In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse­seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep­laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some part or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's ­the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer.

     How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

     Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with the secret of resurrecting the dead. But when he makes a new 'man' out of plundered corpses, his hideous creation fills him disgust.

Rejected by all humanity, the creature sets out to destroy Frankenstein and everyone he loves. And as the monster gets ever closer to his maker, hunter becomes prey in a lethal chase that carries them to the very end of the earth.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

     I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics;' and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him, for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.

     As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain from relating them. One of his most intimate friends was a merchant who, from a flourishing state, fell, through numerous mischances, into poverty. This man, whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition and could not bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts, therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship, and was deeply grieved by his retreat in these unfortunate circumstances. He bitterly deplored the false pride which led his friend to a conduct so little worthy of the affection that united them. He lost no time in endeavouring to seek him out, with the hope of persuading him to begin the world again through his credit and assistance.

     Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself; and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode. Overjoyed at this discovery, he hastened to the house, which was situated in a mean street near the Reuss. But when he entered, misery and despair alone welcomed him. Beaufort had saved but a very small sum of money from the wreck of his fortunes, but it was sufficient to provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the mean time he hoped to procure some respectable employment in a merchant's house. The interval was, consequently, spent in inaction; his grief only became more deep and rankling, when he had leisure for reflection; and at length it took so fast hold of his mind, that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of any exertion.

     His daughter attended him with the greatest tenderness; but she saw with despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing, and that there was no other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an uncommon mould, and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She procured plain work; she plaited straw; and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life.

     Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a beggar. This last blow overcame her, and she knelt by Beaufort's coffin, weeping bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care; and after the interment of his friend he conducted her to Geneva, and placed her under the protection of a relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife.

      There was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents, but this circumstance seemed to unite them only closer in bonds of devoted affection. There was a sense of justice in my father's upright mind, which rendered it necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly. Perhaps during former years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved, and so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth. There was a show of gratitude and worship in his attachment to my mother, differing wholly from the doating fondness of age, for it was inspired by reverence for her virtues and a desire to be the means of, in some degree, recompensing her for the sorrows she had endured, but which gave inexpressible grace to his behaviour to her. Every thing was made to yield to her wishes and her convenience. He strove to shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher wind, and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion in her soft and benevolent mind. Her health, and even the tranquillity of her hitherto constant spirit, had been shaken by what she had gone through. During the two years that had elapsed previous to their marriage my father had gradually relinquished all his public functions; and immediately after their union they sought the pleasant climate of Italy, and the change of scene and interest attendant on a tour through that land of wonders, as a restorative for her weakened frame.

     From Italy they visited Germany and France. I, their eldest child, was born at Naples, and as an infant accompanied them in their rambles. I remained for several years their only child. Much as they were attached to each other, they seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow them upon me. My mother's tender caresses and my father's smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding me, are my first recollections. I was their plaything and their idol, and something better-their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.

     For a long time I was their only care. My mother had much desire to have a daughter, but I continued their single offspring. When I was about five years old, while making an excursion beyond the frontiers of Italy, they passed a week on the shores of the Lake of Como. Their benevolent disposition often made them enter the cottages of the poor. This, to my mother, was more than a duty; it was a necessity, a passion – remembering what she had suffered, and how she had been relieved, – for her to act in her turn the guardian angel to the afflicted. During one of their walks a poor cot in the foldings of a vale attracted their notice as being singularly disconsolate, while the number of half-clothed children gathered about it spoke of penury in its worst shape. One day, when my father had gone by himself to Milan, my mother, accompanied by me, visited this abode. She found a peasant and his wife, hard working, bent down by care and labour, distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes. Among these there was one which attracted my mother far above all the rest. She appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin, and very fair. Her hair was the brightest living gold, and despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features.

     The peasant woman, perceiving that my mother fixed eyes of wonder and admiration on this lovely girl, eagerly communicated her history. She was not her child, but the daughter of a Milanese nobleman. Her mother was a German, and had died on giving her birth. The infant had been placed with these good people to nurse: they were better off then. They had not been long married, and their eldest child was but just born. The father of their charge was one of those Italians nursed in the memory of the antique glory of Italy – one among the schiavi ognor frementi, Z who exerted himself to obtain the liberty of his country. He became the victim of its weakness. Whether he had died, or still lingered in the dungeons of Austria, was not known. His property was confiscated; his child became an orphan and a beggar. She continued with her foster parents, and bloomed in their rude abode, fairer than a garden rose among dark-leaved brambles.

     When my father returned from Milan, he found playing with me in the hall of our villa a child fairer than a pictured cherub – a creature who seemed to shed radiance from her looks and whose form and motions were lighter than the chamois of the hills. The apparition was soon explained. With his permission my mother prevailed on her rustic guardians to yield their charge to her. They were fond of the sweet orphan. Her presence had seemed a blessing to them, but it would be unfair to her to keep her in poverty and want, when Providence afforded her such powerful protection. They consulted their village priest, and the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza became the inmate of my parents' house – my more than sister – the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures.

     Everyone loved Elizabeth. The passionate and most reverential attachment with which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight. On the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said playfully, 'I have a pretty present for my Victor – tomorrow he shall have it.' And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine – mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me – my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten

Crimes Against Humanity by Geoffrey Robertson

     Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity is a superb and highly influential account of the history of the human rights movement up to the present day. From the French Revolution and the Nuremberg trials to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Robertson traces the developing concept of human rights and shows how far we still have to go. His inspiring narrative is both a masterly history and a clarion call to the global justice movement. 

Crimes Against Humanity by Geoffrey Robertson

Extract

      The notion that individuals, wherever in the world they live, possess a few basic powers which no political order can remove, has had a momentous impact at two points in modern history. The first, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, was in every way revolutionary: it inspired and justified both the American battle for independence from Britain and the overthrow of the despotic monarchy in France. It endowed these upheavals with a political meaning far beyond the republics which were their immediate object, by establishing the liberty of the individual as a precondition of and restriction on the power of the State. This was not unique to America and France: in other societies limitations had been imposed by tradition or cultural convention, or (most notably in Britain) by compact and common law, but what was truly groundbreaking was the constitutional enu­meration of rights which the citizen could enforce against the govern­ment by taking it to court. But the notion that 'rights' might belong to anyone, anywhere, as a human inheritance was ridiculed by nine­teenth-century philosophers and when the majority of Western powers agreed to outlaw slavery, this was attributed to shared moral generos­ity rather than to any recognition of an inalienable individual right not to be held in bondage or servitude. It dawned on no political leader, even after the carnage of the First World War, that international institutions might tell states how to treat their nationals - the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were untroubled by 'human rights' until Hitler rendered them irrelevant. At this point, the individual had no rights in international law, which dealt with treaties and agreements between states and was completely inaccessible to their citizens.

The Holocaust was a revelation that was to change this for ever. It crystallized the Allied war aims, and called forth an international tribunal- the court at Nuremberg - to punish individual Nazis for the barbarities they had authorized against German citizens. These charges - called, for the first time, 'crimes against humanity' - were distinct from the 'war crimes' the Axis partners had inflicted upon Allied soldiers and prisoners-of-war. The logic of the crime against humanity, first defined in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, was that future state agents who authorized torture or genocide against their own populations were criminally responsible, in international law, and might be punished by any court capable of catc9ing them. For the first time, it could be said that individuals had a 'right' to be treated with a minimum of civility by their own governments, which 'right' all other governments had a correlative duty to uphold by trying the torturers who fell into their hands, or else by setting up international courts to punish them. This was the legal legacy of Nuremberg, supplemented by a United Nations system which promised institutional support for a 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The second great moment for human rights - the creation of a process by which it could emerge from the domestic laws and constitutions of a few countries into a universal system affording some minimum protection to everyone, everywhere - had arrived. At the Palais Chail­lot in Paris, on IQ December 1948, the president of the General Assembly, Dr H. V. Evatt (the Australian foreign minister), announced the advent of a new international law of human rights, for the first time transcending the laws and customs of independent sovereign states: 'millions of men, women and children, all over the world, many miles from Paris and New York, will turn for help, guidance and inspiration to this document'.

But this moment was short-lived. The evolutionary process for international human rights law, commenced so confidently, was frozen almost to a standstill by the Cold War. The power blocs did not deny the idea of universal human rights - with shameless hypo­crisy, they contentedly signed convention after convention on the subject - so long as no meaningful enforcement action could ever be taken. 'Human rights' became a phrase incorporated into insults traded between the Great Powers, as they secretly vied for the support of dictatorships which comprehensively violated them. The four decades between I948 and the collapse of communism may be charac­terized - and stigmatized - as the lipservice era for human rights, when diplomats strove to ensure that they could never be meaningfully asserted against a nation state. There were times - the early days of Jimmy Carter's presidency, for example - when the idea resonated before succumbing to realpolitik, and undoubtedly the 'help, guidance and inspiration' of human rights was an important factor in the ultimate failure of some regimes notorious for denying them: the military juntas of Latin America, the apartheid system in South Africa, the USSR and its puppet states of eastern Europe. But all that hap­pened to human rights law over those four decades was a series of academic exercises, honing and refining and putting in place inter­national conventions - most notably the twin Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights - which were marvels of modern. diplomacy: none of the states which signed them intended them to work.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson

Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom is the coming-of-age story of a spontaneous heroine who finds herself ensconced in the rigidity of a turn-of-the-century boarding school. The clever and highly imaginative Laura has difficulty fitting in with her wealthy classmates and begins to compromise her ideals in her search for popularity and acceptance.

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson

Extract

 Chapter One

   The four children were lying on the grass.

'... and the Prince went further and further into the forest,' said the elder girl, 'till he came to a beautiful glade - a glade, you know, is a place in the forest that is open and green and lovely. And there he saw a lady, a beautiful lady, in a long white dress that hung down to her ankles, with a golden belt and a golden crown. She was lying on the sward - a sward, you know, is grass as smooth as velvet, just like green velvet - and the Prince saw the marks of travel on her garments. The bottom of the lovely silk dress was all dirty—'

'Wondrous Fair, if you don't mind you'll make that sheet dirty, too,' said Pin.   .

'Shut up, will you' answered her sister who, carried away by her narrative, had approached her boots to some linen that was bleaching.

'Yes, but you know Sarah'll be awfly cross if she has to wash it again,' said Pin, who was practical.

'You'll put me out altogether,' cried Laura angrily. - 'Well, as I said, the edge of her robe was all muddy - no, I don't think I will say that; it sounds prettier if it's clean. So it hung in long, straight beautiful folds to her ankles, and the Prince saw two little feet in golden sandals peeping out from under the hem of the silken gown, and—'

'But what about the marks of travel?' asked Leppie.

'Donkey' haven't I said they weren't there? If I say they weren't, then they weren't. She hadn't travelled at all.'

'Oh, parrakeets!' cried little Frank.

Four pairs of eyes went up to the bright green flock that was passing over the garden.

'Now you've all interrupted, and I shan't tell any more, said Laura in a proud voice.

'Oh, yes, please do, Wondrous Fair! Tell what happened next,' begged Pin and Leppie.

'No, not another word. You can only think of sheets and parrakeets. '

'Please, Wondrous Fair,' begged little Frank.

'No, I can't now. – Another thing: I don't mind if you call me Laura to-day, as it's the last day.'

She lay back on the grass, her hands clasped under her head. A voice was heard, loud, imperative.

'Laura, I want you. Come here.'

'That's mother calling,' said Pin.

Laura kicked her heels. The two little boys laughed approval.

'Go on, Laura,' coaxed Pin. 'Mother'll be angry. I'll come, too.'

Laura raised herself with a grumble. 'It's to try on that horrid dress.'

In very fact Mother was standing, already somewhat impatient, with the dress in her hand. Laura wriggled out of the one she had on, and stood stiffly and ungraciously, with her arms held like pokers from her sides, while Mother on her knees arranged the length.

'Don't put on a face like that, miss!' she said sharply on seeing Laura's air. 'Do you think I'm making it for my own pleasure?' She had sewn at it all day, and was hot and tired.

'It's too short,' said Laura, looking down.

'It's nothing of the kind,' said Mother, with her mouth full of pins.

'It is, it's much too shore

Mother gave her a slight shake. 'Don't you contradict me' Do you want to tell me I don't know what length you're to wear your dresses?'

'I won't wear it at all if you don't make it longer,' said Laura defiantly.

Pin's chubby, featureless little face lengthened with ap­prehension.

'Do let her have it just a tiny bit longer, mother dear, dear' she pleaded.

'Now, Pin, what have you got to do with it I'd like to know' said Mother, on the vergc of losing her temper over the back folds, which would not hang.

'I'm going to school to-morrow, and it's a shame,' said Laura in the low, passionate tone that never failed to exasperate Mother, so different was it from her own hearty fashion of venting displeasure. Pin began to sniff, in sheer nervous anxiety.

'Very well then. I won't do another stitch to it' and Mother, now angry in earnest, got up and bounced out of the room.

'Laura, how can you?' said Pin, dissolving. 'It's only you who make her SO cross.'

'I don't care,' said Laura rebelliously, though she was not far off tears herself 'It is a shame. All the other girls will have dresses down to the tops of their boots, and they'll laugh at me, and call me a baby;' and touched by the thought of what lay before her, she, too, began to sniffle. She did not fail, however, to roll the dress up and to throw it into a corner of the room. She also kicked the ewer, which fell over and flooded the floor. Pin cried more loudly, and ran to fetch Sarah.

Laura returned to the garden. The two little boys came up to her; but she waved them back.

'Let me alone, children. I want to think.'

She stood in a becoming attitude by the garden-gate, her brothers hovering in the background. - Then Mother called once more.

'Laura, where are you?'

'Here, mother. What is it?'

'Did you knock this jug over or did Pin?'

'I did, mother.'

'Did you do it on purpose?'

'Yes.'

'Come here to me.'

She went, with lagging steps. But Mother's anger had passed: she was at work on the dress again, and by squinting her eyes Laura could see that a piece was being added to the skirt. She was penitent at once; and when Mother in a sorry voice said: 'I'm ashamed of you, Lama. And on your last day, too,' her throat grew narrow.

'I didn't mean it, mother.'

'If only you would ask properly for things, you would get them.'

Laura knew this, knew indeed that, did she coax, Mother could refuse her nothing. But coaxing came hard to her; something within her forbade it. Sarah called her 'high­stomached', to the delight of the other children and her own indignation; she had explained to them again and again what Sarah really meant.

On leaving the house she went straight to the flower-beds: she would give Mother, who liked flowers very well but had no time to gather them, a bouquet the size of a cabbage. Pin and the boys were summoned to help her, and when their hands were full, Laura led the way to a secluded part of the gar­den on the farther side of the detached brick kitchen. In this strip, which was filled with greenery, little sun fell: two thick fir trees and a monstrous blue-gum stood there; high bushes screened the fence; jessamine climbed the wall of the house and encircled the bedroom windows; and on the damp and shady ground only violets grew. Yet, with the love children bear to the limited and compact, the four had chosen their own little spots here rather than in the big garden at the back of the house; and many were the times they had all begun anew to dig and to rake. But if Laura's energy did not fizzle out as quickly as usual - she was the mood for the rest - Mother was sure to discover that it was too cramped and dark for them in there, and send Sarah to drive them off.

Here, safely screened from sight, Laura sat on a bench and made up her bouquet. When it was finished - red and white in the centre with a darker border, the whole surrounded by a ring of violet leaves - she looked about for something to tie it up with. Sarah, applied to, was busy ironing, and had no string in the kitchen, so Pin ran to get a reel of cotton. But while she was away Laura had an idea. Bidding Leppie hold the flowers tight in both his sticky little hands, she climbed in at her bedroom window, or rather, by lying on the sill with her legs waving in the air, she managed to grab, without losing her balance, a pair of scissors from the chest of drawers. With these between her teeth she emerged, to the excited interest of the boys who watched her open­-mouthed.

Laura had dark curls, Pin fair, and both wore them flapping at their backs, the only difference being that Laura, who was now twelve years old, had for the past year been allowed to bind hers together with a ribbon, while Pin's bobbed as they chose. Every morning early, Mother brushed and twisted, with a kind of grim pride, these silky ringlets round her finger. Although the five odd minutes the curling occupied were durance vile to Laura, the child was proud of her hair in her own way; and when in the street she heard someone say: 'Look - what pretty curls!' she would give her head a toss and send them all a-rippling. In addition to this, there was a crown­ing glory connected with them: one hot December morning, when they had been tangled and Mother had kept her standing too long, she had fainted, pulling the whole dressing-table down about her ears; and ever since, she had been marked off in some mysterious fashion from the other children. Mother would not let her go out at midday in summer: Sarah would I say: 'Let that be, can't you' did she try to lift something that was too heavy for her; and the younger children were to be quelled by a threat to faint on the spot, if they did not do as she wished. 'Laura's faint' had become a byword in the family; and Laura herself held it for so important a fact in her life that she had more than once begun a friendship with the words: 'Have you ever fainted? I have.'

From among these long, glossy curls, she now cut one of the longest and most spiral, cut it off close to the root, and with it bound the flowers together. Mother should see that she did I know how to give up something she cared for, and was not as selfish as she was usually supposed to be.

'Oh . . . h. . . h ' said both little boys in a breath, then doubled up in noisy mirth. Laura was constantly doing something to set their young blood in amazement: they looked upon her as the personification of all that was startling and unexpected. But Pin, returning with the reel of thread, opened her eyes in a different way.

'Oh, Laura . . . ,'she began, tearful at once.

'Now, res'vor'! retorted Laura scornfully - 'res'vor' was Sarah's name for Pin, on account of her perpetual wateriness. 'Be a cry-baby, do.' But she was not damped; she was lost ill the pleasure of self-sacrifice.

Pin looked after her as she danced on, then moved submis­sively in her wake to be near at hand should intercession be needed. Laura was so unsuspecting, and Mother would be so cross. In her dim, childish way Pin longed to see these, her two nearest, at peace; she understood them both so well, and they had little or no understanding for each other. - So she crept to the house at her sister's heels.

Lama did not go indoors; hiding against the wall of the Bagged verandah, she threw her bouquet in at the window, meaning it to fall on Mother's lap.

But Mother had dropped her needle, and was just lifting her face, flushed with stooping, when the flowers hit her a thwack on the head. She groped again, impatiently, to find what had struck her, recognised the peace-offering, and thought of the surprise cake that was to go into Laura's box on the morrow. Then she saw the curl, and her face darkened. Was there ever such a tiresome child? What in all the world would she do next?

'Laura, come here, directly'

Laura had moved away; she was not expecting recognition.

If Mother were pleased she would call Pin to put the flowers in water for her, and that would be the end of it. The idea of a word of thanks would have made Laura fed uncomfortable. Now, however, at the tone of Mother's voice, her mouth set stubbornly. She went indoors as bidden, but was already up in arms again.

'You're a very naughty girl indeed' began Mother as soon she appeared. 'How dare you cut off your hair? Upon my word, if it weren't your last night I'd send you to bed without any supper' - an unheard-of threat on the part of Mother, who punished her children in any way but that of denying them their food. 'It's a very good thing you're leaving home to-morrow, for you'd soon be setting the others at defiance, too, and I should have four naughty children on my hands instead of one. - But I'd be ashamed to go to school such a fright if I were you. Turn round at once and let me see you!'

Laura turned, with a sinking heart. Pin cried softly in a corner.

'She thought it would please you, mother,' she sobbed.

'I will not have you interfering, Pin, when I'm speaking to Laura. She's old enough by now to know what I like and what I don't,' said Mother, who was vexed at the thought of the child going among strangers thus disfigured. – 'And now get away, and don't let me see you again. You're a perfect sight.'

'Oh, Laura, you do look funny!' said Leppie and Frank in weak chorus, as she passed them in the passage.

'Well, you 'ave made a guy of yourself this time, Miss Laura, and no mistake l' said Sarah, who had heard the above.

Laura went into her own room and locked the door, a thing Mother did not allow. Then she threw herself on the bed and cried. Mother had not understood in the least; and she had made herself a sight into the bargain. She refused to open the door, though one after another rattled the handle, and Sarah threat­ened to tum the hose in at the window. So they left her alone, and she spent the evening in watery dudgeon on her pillow. But before she undressed for the night she stealthily made a chink and took in the slice of cake Pin had left on the door-mat. Her natural buoyancy of spirit was beginning to reassert itself. By brushing her hair well to one side she could cover up the gap, she found; and after all, there was something rather pleasant in knowing that you were misunderstood. It made you feel different from everyone else.

Mother - sewing hard after even the busy Sarah had retired - Mother smiled a stem little smile of amusement to herself; and before locking up for the night put the dark, curl safely away.

http://www.popularpenguins.com.au/default.cfm?page=topten