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Passage 1
(adapted from A Bit of Green
from Melchior's Dream and Other Tales by Juliana Horatia Ewing)
Children who always live with grass and flowers at their feet, and a clear sky overhead, can have no real idea of the charm that country sights and sounds have for those whose home is in a busy, manufacturing town—a town, in fact, as I lived in when I was a boy, which is more than twenty years ago.
My father was a doctor, and we lived in a comfortable house. I was born and raised there; and, ever since I could remember, the last sound that soothed my ears at night and the first to which I awoke in the morning, was the eternal rumbling and rattling of the carts and carriages as they passed over the rough stones. I never noticed if I heard them in the daytime, but at night my chief amusement, as I lay in bed, was to guess by the sound of the wheels what sort of vehicle was passing.
"That light, sharp rattle is a horse-drawn cab," I thought. "What a noise it makes and gone in a moment! One gentleman inside, I think. There goes a light cart; that's a carriage by the way the horses step." And the cart came so slowly that I was asleep before it had got safely out of hearing.
Ours was a very noisy street, but the noise made the night cheerful; and so did the clock tower near my house, which struck every quarter of an hour; and so did the light of the street lamps, which came through the blinds and fell upon my little bed. We had very little light, except street light and daylight; sunshine rarely found its way to us, and, when it did, people were so little used to it that they pulled down the blinds for fear it should hurt the carpets. In the room that my sister Minnie and I shared, we always welcomed the sunshine with blinds rolled up to the very top; and as we had no carpet, no damage was done.
Passage 2
(adapted from The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame)
The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First, with brooms, then with dusters, then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash, till he had splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, an aching back and tired arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, entering even his dark and little house with its spirit of discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was attracting his attention, and he climbed through the steep little tunnel filled with gravel to reach the street owned by animals who lived in houses that received plenty of sunlight and air. So, he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and again scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.
"This is fine and so much better than whitewashing!" he said to himself.
The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes soothed his heated brow, and after the loneliness of the little cellar he had lived in so long, the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.
"Hold up!" said an elderly rabbit at the gap.
"Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!"
He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and silly Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge, looking funnily at the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the noise was about.
"Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!" he remarked jokingly, and he was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply.
Then they all started grumbling at each other. "How strange you are! Why didn't you tell him—" "Well, why didn't you say—" "You might have reminded him—" and so on, in the usual way, but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case.
