1. It is clear that the speaker here is a child whose parents did not allow him to
mix with some other children because they thought them to be rough. What
signs of roughness are mentioned in these lines?
Answers
Explanation:
I spent the morning in the nurse’s office, counting the schoolbells as they announced the end of classes. At two in the afternoon, our neighbors picked me up and drove me back home.
When I got home, I saw my father crying on the porch—even though he had usually been very composed at funerals. Big Jim Evans was there too, and he said it was an especially tough loss.
The baby made little baby sounds and laughed and rocked back and forth in its carriage when I came into the house. I was embarrassed because the old men who'd come over to the house kept standing up to shake my hand.
Those men said they were “sorry for my loss.” People whispered around me, saying that I was the oldest child in the family and had been away at boarding school. Meanwhile, my mother held my hand in hers.
She wasn't crying, but let out rough sighs that sounded like coughing and were full of anger. At ten o’clock, the ambulance showed up with the body, wrapped in bandages by the nurses at the hospital.
In the morning, I went up to the room where the body lay. There were snowdrop flowers and candles by the bed to make the scene more bearable. I looked at him for the first time in six weeks. He was paler now than he was the last time I'd seen him.
He had a red bruise on the left side of his forehead. He lay in a four-foot long box, just as though he were lying in bed. He didn’t have any big, obvious scars. When the car’s bumper hit him, it knocked him out of the way of the wheels.
His coffin was four feet long: one foot for each year that he lived.
Answer:
According to:
When the old man was calculating the gold coins, the speaker knew he would be out of work again until the money had been spent or the job the old man decided to hire him for had been completed. He will be bound more than that in this deal. It didn't please him and so he turned it down.