How the horsemen, two and two, with their plumes of white and blue, And crimson, gold and purple, nodding by at me and you, Waved the banners that they bore, as the knights in days of yore, Till our glad eyes gleamed and glistened like the spangles that they wore! How the graceless-graceful stride of the elephant was eyed, And the capers of the little horse that cantered at his side! How the shambling camels, tame to the plaudits of their fame, With listless eyes came silent, masticating as they came. How the cages jolted past, with each wagon battened fast, The snout of some strange animal that sniffed the outer air! And, last of all, The Clown, making mirth for all the town, With his lips curved ever upward and his eyebrows ever down, And his chief attention paid to the little mule that played A tattoo on the dashboard with his heels, in the Parade. Oh! the Circus-Day Parade! How the bugles played and played! And how the glossy horses tossed their flossy manes and neighed, As the rattle and the rhyme of the tenor drummer's time Filled all the hungry hearts of us with melody sublime! JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY1 Enjoying the Poem A country boy wrote this poem. What does he mean by "hungry hearts" in the first stanza? Why do boys always follow a circus parade? What kind of boys? The poet says they "marched in unconscious capture." What does he mean? Read the stanza that tells about the horsemen. Read the stanza that tells about the elephant and the camels. What is meant by the "graceless-graceful stride of the elephant"? What mystery was within the cages? Read the stanza that tells about the clown. Stories of the Circus Tell about one thing you have enjoyed at the cirTell it so that others will enjoy it too. cus. Dictation Write the following from dictation: Big bright posters announced that the circus was coming. How excited we were! Around every billboard there were crowds of boys and girls. Everybody was saying, "Are you going to the circus?" Notice that after expressions of strong feeling an exclamation point (!) is used. 1 From the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright 1913. Used by special permission of the Publishers, The BobbsMerrill Company. Conversation XV. VERBS We use verbs a great deal in conversation. Work out in class a conversation on one of the following suggestions: 1. Between two boys who are planning a hike 2. Between a pupil who has been tardy at school and the teacher 3. Between a boy who wishes to trade a pair of skates and another boy who has a football 4. Between two boys who have a quarter of a dollar apiece (Let one boy tell why he is going to save his money, and the other how he is going to spend his.) Each conversation should work toward a definite point; that is, when the two people have finished talking, each one should know what the other one means. You must stick to the point, and leave out matters that have no bearing on that point. Written Conversation Write one of the conversations suggested in the preceding section. Be careful to use quotation marks correctly and to separate each quotation from the rest of the sentence by a comma. Verbs Select the predicate verbs used in your written conversation. CORRECT USAGE 175 Exercise Select the subject substantive and the predicate verb in each of the following sentences. Also select all other nouns. 1. The king listened to the people. 2. The birds quarreled over their food. 4. All the animals fear the tiger. 7. The canoe floated on the river. 8. The three brothers sat in their usual places. Io. The little boy laughed at the funny story. STOP LOOK LISTEN' Rise means go up by one's own effort; raise means cause some one or something else to go up. It is correct to say "I rise at seven o'clock"; "Raise the window." Learn the principal parts of these two verbs: Use the correct form of rise or raise in each of the There are two sounds of g: the hard sound, as in go, and the sound of j, as in gem. Both sounds occur in the word suggest, where the first g is hard and the second has the sound of j. The dictionary respells words in which g has the sound of j, thus: gelatin (jěl'a-tin). The hard sound of g is the more usual sound, and is considered its normal sound. Look in the dictionary for the pronunciation of the following words: Watch your pronunciation of these words. All of them are frequently mispronounced. The Topic Sentence Read the following paragraphs carefully, and select the topic sentence of each: We observe "Good English Week" early in November. We are learning that this week is a model week, during |