A large river-boat was going down the Mississippi on its way to New Orleans. One of the passengers on the boat was a young gentleman, St. Clare by name. He had with him a daughter between five and six years of age. The child was so beautiful that people turned and looked after her as she went by.
If you are invited to an English home, at five o’clock in the morning you get a cup of tea. You must not say ‘Go away’. On the contrary, you have to say, with your best five o’clock smile, ‘Thank you so much. I love a cup of early morning tea, especially early in the morning.’
In 1996, a stray calico cat named Scarlett became a true legend in Brooklyn. When a fire broke out in an abandoned garage, she did the unthinkable — walking through flames five separate times to rescue each of her five kittens.
An old man meets a young man who asks:
“Do you remember me?”
And the old man says no. Then the young man tells him he was his student, and the teacher asks:
“What do you do, what do you do in life?”
There was a king who thought that he could paint very well. His pictures were bad, but the people to whom he showed them were afraid of the king. They all said that they liked his pictures very much.
There was a time when the people of Greece were not united but instead there were several states each of which had its own ruler.
Some of the people in the southern part of the country were called Spartans and they were famous for their simple habits and their bravery.
There is probably no one among book-lovers who has not heard of Sherlock Holmes, the skilful and clever detective in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes’ method of analysing the most difficult problems was to notice the smallest facts, even if they seemed unimportant. His method never failed; the criminal always had to give up, and to become the prisoner of the great detective.
A man entered a barber’s shop with a boy of five or six years old holding his hand. He was in a great hurry and he asked the barber to cut his hair first and later to cut the boy’s hair.
A nervous man, who lived in one of suburbs of a big town in England, was walking home from the railway station. The road was dark and lonely. Suddenly he heard footsteps approaching him from behind and thought he was being followed. He walked quickly. The footsteps continued to follow. The man started running. The footsteps still followed him. The man jumped over a wall and, running into an old cemetery, threw himself on the grass near one of the graves.
A rich American went to Paris and bought a very strange picture painted by a fashionable modern artist. The American thought the picture was very fine because he had paid a lot of money for it. But when he came to his hotel and wanted to hang the picture up on the wall, he could not tell which was the top and which the bottom of the picture. The American turned the picture this way and that, but still could not decide which was the top and which was the bottom.
