【英文原著类】a waif of the plains(草原流浪儿).pdf

A WAIF OF THE PLAINS
A WAIF OF THE
PLAINS
by Bret Harte
1
A WAIF OF THE PLAINS
CHAPTER I
A long level of dull gray that further away became a faint blue, with
here and there darker patches that looked like water. At times an open
space, blackened and burnt in an irregular circle, with a shred of
newspaper, an old rag, or broken tin can lying in the ashes. Beyond these
always a low dark line that seemed to sink into the ground at night, and
rose again in the morning with the first light, but never otherwise changed
its height and distance. A sense of always moving with some indefinite
purpose, but of always returning at night to the same place--with the same
surroundings, the same people, the same bedclothes, and the same awful
black canopy dropped down from above. A chalky taste of dust on the
mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and an all-pervading
heat and smell of cattle.
This was "The Great Plains" as they seemed to two children from the
hooded depth of an emigrant wagon, above the swaying heads of toiling
oxen, in the summer of 1852.
It had appeared so to them for two weeks, always the same and always
without the least sense to them of wonder or monotony. When they
viewed it from the road, walking beside the wagon, there was only the
team itself added to the unvarying picture. One of the wagons bore on its
canvas hood the inscription, in large black letters, "Off to California!" on
the other "Root, Hog, or Die," but neither of them awoke in the minds of
the children the faintest idea of playfulness or jocularity. Perhaps it was
difficult to connect the serious men, who occasionally walked beside them
and seemed to grow more taciturn and depressed as the day wore on, with
this past effusive pleasantry.
Yet the impressions of the two children differed slightly. The eldest,
a boy of eleven, was apparently new to the domestic habits and customs of
a life to which the younger, a girl of seven, was evident