Charles Dickens

From A Tale of Two Cities

A

 large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine shop, shattered like a walnut shell.

            All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

            A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women and children—re­sounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and danc­ing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out.

Notes and exercises:

1.   Read the following words and note that they are spelt with a double “c”:

accident    accrue      succumb       occur       accept          occasion       success accredit     accuse     accelerate    soccer     according    accent           baccy succeed     access     account        accede     Boccaccio    accumulate     accuracy

      

2.   The short [i] is spelt as “ie” in the following words: handkerchief, neckerchief, mischief, mischievous, sieve.

3.   Pronounce correctly the plural forms of the following nouns:

mouth     bath        path      youth     length    berth     birth       wreath     oath         earth      hearth     moth     cloth      death      faith      heath     sloth       sheath

     

4.   Supply the appropriate word chosen from those given in brackets:

a)       This material doesn’t (dye, die) well.

b)      Four quarters make a (hole, whole).

c)       One can’t run with the (hare, hair) and hunt with the hounds.

d)      The room was (bear, bare) of furniture.

e)       A (bear, bear’s) (hare, hair) is longer than that of a (hare, hair).

5.   Word study:

expressly   1) plainly, definitely: You were expressly forbidden to touch my papers. 2) specially, on purpose: This dictionary is expressly compiled for foreign students of English.

champ        to bite food noisily (of horses)

scavenger  an animal or bird that lives on decaying flesh; a person who searches among discarded or refuse material

6.   Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

a wine-shop, to go shopping, to go window shopping, a shop walker, a shoplifter, all over the shop (sl.), to come to the wrong shop, to talk shop (to discuss one’s business or profession on private and informal occasions);

pointing every way, where there’s a will there’s a way, it happened way back in the 1960’s, by the way, you can’t have it both ways, to stay out of the way, to be in the way, on one’s way home, to have a way with, the reform paved the way for further changes, everyone must go his own way, there’s no way to know this, to go the way of all flesh (to die), ways and means, have one’s own way (to do as one wishes: I want to go to London, and I mean to have my own way), by way of