He Bob proposed: "A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!" Which all the family reëchoed. "God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all. sat very close to his father's side, upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favor when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at home. Also, how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before; and how the lord "was much about as tall as Peter." At which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by-andby they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed. There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not welldressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's. But they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim until the last. G. In Burns's Tam o' Shanter, Longfellow's Hiawatha, Bryant's Thanatopsis, and other poems, there are indentions indicating the logical divisions of the poem. Each division corresponds to a prose paragraph. Read one of these poems (or the portion of it assigned by the teacher), and ask yourself why the indention is in each case made where you find it. Find or make a topic statement for each division. Then make statements for the lesser divisions and arrange the whole so as to show the plan of the poem. H. The stanzas of a poem do not usually mark off equally important logical divisions. The important divisions are groups of stanzas. In Coleridge's Ancient Mariner there are seven stanzagroups, or parts. Account for this division. What is the topic of each part? Are there lesser groups in each part? If so, make topic statements for all of them, and arrange the whole so as to show the plan of the poem. I. If you should be asked to reproduce a poem in which there were no marks of division except the stanzas, one of the first things to do would be to divide the poem into its logical parts, its stanzagroups. Try this with Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night, Macaulay's Horatius, or any other poem of your own selection. J. In the following short poem by Tennyson, as in many short poems, the stanzas do mark off logical divisons of equal importance. What is the topic of each stanza? What is the main thought of the poem ? Home they brought her warrior dead; She nor swooned, nor uttered cry. All her maidens, watching, said, Then they praised him, soft and low; Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee. How Paragraphs Grow. 19. We may develop a topic statement into a paragraph in five principal ways: 1. By repeating the topical idea in other forms, 2. By making comparisons or contrasts, 3. By adding particulars and details, 4. By giving specific instances, 5. By showing the effects of which the topic is the cause. We shall now illustrate each of these methods of development. By Repetition. 20. 1. A tree is an underground creature, with its tail in the air. 2. All its intelligence is in its roots. 3. All the senses it has are in its roots. 4. Think what sagacity it shows in its search after food and drink! 5. Somehow or other, the rootlets, which are its tentacles, find out that there is a brook at a moderate distance from the trunk of the tree, and they make for it with all their might. 6. They find every crack in the rocks where there are a few grains of the nourishing substance they care for, and insinuate themselves in its deepest recesses. 7. When spring and summer come, they let their tails grow, and delight in whisking them about in the wind, or letting them be whisked about by it; for these tails are poor passive things, with very little will of their own, and bend in whatever direction the wind chooses to make them. 8. The leaves make a deal of noise whispering. 9. I have sometimes thought I could understand them, as they talk with each other, and that they seemed to think they made the wind as they wagged forward and back. 10. Remember what I say. 11. The next time you see a tree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the tail of a great underground, many-armed, polypus-like creature, which is as proud of its caudal appendage, especially in summer-time, as a peacock of his gorgeous expanse of plumage. HOLMES: Over the Teacups. In the foregoing paragraph the topic statement occupies the first two sentences: A tree is an underground creature with its tail in the air and all its intelligence in its roots. A statement so surprising naturally calls for some explanation. Notice, now, how the explanation is made, that is, how the topic idea is developed. In sentence 3, the writer says over again, in slightly different words, what he said in sentence 2, "All the senses it has [that is, all its intelligence] are in its roots." In like manner in sentence 4 he says over again what he has said in sentences 2 and 3, “Think what sagacity [that is, what intelligence, what sense] it shows in its search after food and drink" [that is, in its roots]. Just so sentences 7-9 are a kind of repetition of the idea, "An underground creature with its tail in the air," and sentence 11 repeats in expanded form the ideas of sentences 1 and 2. Plainly, then, this method of paragraph growth is by repetition, the principal idea being repeated in detail. It should be noticed, however, that the repetition amounts to more than merely putting one word in place of another; the idea grows by each repetition. Every repeated form of the thought adds to its clearness, its concreteness, or its emphasis. Frequently a writer seems to have said to himself, "I will say this thing in another way, so that my precise meaning cannot fail to be understood." Then his explanations, whether they apparently repeat the topic idea or not, have the force of a definition, setting limits to his idea, making it narrower or broader; and he is likely to tell, in different ways, not only what the thing is, but also what the thing is not. In the following, for example, Ruskin, evidently wishing to make us understand precisely what a piece of English ground should have in order to be beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful, really defines these three terms both affirmatively and negatively. The parts in which he tells what the piece of English ground should not have are here printed in italics. We will try to make some small piece of English ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steamengines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons; no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour in the risk of our lives; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or in |