The Copybook

Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.

1471
Silver Swan Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s attention was drawn off people-watching for a moment by an extraordinarily lifelike machine.

At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1867, American novelist Mark Twain saw a remarkable ‘automaton’, a silver swan that seemed for all the world like a living thing. But the incorrigible people-watcher could not keep his attention fixed even on that.

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1472
Mathieu Martinel and the Drowning Soldier Clay Lane

A young French cavalry soldier took a tremendous risk to rescue a drowning man.

Mathieu Martinel enrolled in the French army in January 1816, at the age of sixteen. It was a time of relative peace, but opportunities for heroism appeared to come looking for him.

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1473
Mathieu Martinel and the Blazing Barracks Clay Lane

The soldier went quite deliberately into a burning room full of gunpowder and ammunition.

Mathieu Martinel was a cavalry soldier in the French army. At the age of twenty, he had already saved a fellow-soldier from drowning in the River Ill, but his heroic exploits were far from over.

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1474
Mathieu Martinel and the Fireworks Clay Lane

A firework display in Paris turned to tragedy in the narrow streets of the capital.

It is 1837, and Mathieu Martinel, a cavalry soldier in the French army, is now a senior officer in the military college in Paris. Fate, however, had not yet finished testing his mettle.

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1475
The Cat Who Walks by Himself Clay Lane

The sly cat hatches a plan to get all the benefits of domestic life without any of the responsibilities.

In this short tale by Rudyard Kipling, we learn how the Cat tried to get all the comforts of domestic life without doing any work in return.

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1476
The Pig-and-Potato War Clay Lane

In 1859, peaceful co-existence on the Canadian border was severely tested by a marauding pig.

Even quite late in Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain and the United States of America were still carving up what had once been British colonial territory. One disputed region was San Juan Island near Vancouver, where a dead pig almost led to war.

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