7th Coach Lesson 22 Respond to Literature

Huck is a boy who has run away from home and is hiding on an
island in the Mississippi River. Fearing he has drowned, people
in the community are firing a cannon over the river, which they
believe can raise a drowned body.

excepted and adapted from
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

I was powerful lazy and comfortable—didn’t want to
get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was dozing off again
when I thinks I hears a deep sound of “boom!” away up
the river. I rouses up, and rests on my elbow and listens:
pretty soon I hears it again. I hopped up, and went and
looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of
smoke laying on the water along ways up—about abreast
the ferry. And there was the ferryboat full of people
floating along down. I knew what was the matter now.
“Boom!” I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat’s
side. You see, they was firing cannon over the water
trying to make my carcass come to the top.

I was pretty hungry, but it wasn’t going to do for me
to start a fire, because they might see the smoke. So I set
there and watched the cannon-smoke and listened to the
boom. The river was a mile wide there, and it always
looks pretty on a summer morning—so I was having a
good enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders if I
only had a bite to eat. Well, then I happened to think how
they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float

them off, because they always go right to the drowned
carcass and stop there. So, says, I I’ll keep a lookout, and if
any of them is floating around after me I’ll give them a
show. I changed to the Illinois edge of the island to see
what luck I could have, and I wars’t disappointed. A big
double loaf come along, and I most got it with a long stick,
but my foot slipped and she floated out further. Of course
I was where the current set in the closest to the shore—I
knew enough for that. But by and by along comes another
one, and this time I won. I took out the plug and shook out
the little dab of quicksilver, and set my teeth in. It was
“baker’s bread”—what the quality eat; none of your low-
down corn-pone.

Oliver was born in a workhouse, and his mother died right after
his birth, leaving him and orphan. At the age of 10, he has been
sent to live in a coffin shop, where his future is uncertain.

excerpted and adapted from
Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

Oliver, being left to himself in the undertaker’s shop,
set the lamp down on a workman’s bench, and gazed
timidly about him with a feeling of awe and dread, which
many people a good deal older than he will be a no loss to
understand. An unfinished coffin on black tressels, which
stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and
death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time

his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object:
from which he almost expected to see some frightful form
slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror. Against
the wall were ranged, in regular array a long row of elm
boards cut in the same shape: looking in the dim light, like
high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches’
pockets. . . .The shop was close and hot. The atmosphere
seemed tainted with the smell of coffins. The recess
beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was
thrust, looked like a grave.

Nor were these the only dismal feelings which
depressed Oliver. He was alone in a strange place; and we
all know how chilled and desolate the best of us will
sometimes feel in such a situation. The boy had no friends
to care for, or to care for him. The regret of no recent
separation was fresh in his mind; the absence of no loved
and well-remembered face sank heavily into his heart.

But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding; and he
wished, as he crept into this narrow bed, that that were his
coffin, and that he could be lain in a calm and lasting sleep
in the churchyard ground, with the tall grass waving
gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep bell
to soothe him in his sleep.