Extracts from Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Fiction’
Rikki-tikki-tavi had never met a cobra before, but when the first thrill of fear had passed he knew what he must do.
Little mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi has been swept by a flood into the garden of an English couple living in a bungalow in Sugauli (near the border with Nepal) during the Raj. He is immediately adopted as a pet by Teddy, the couple’s young boy, but Rikki-tikki soon finds that not all is well in the garden. Indeed, Darzee the tailorbird is desolate.
In the opening lines of The Cuckoo Clock, Mrs Molesworth paints a word-picture of a house so old that Time itself seemed to have stopped.
The Cuckoo Clock (1877), a children’s story by Mrs Mary Louisa Molesworth (published under the pen-name of Ennis Graham), tells of a little girl named Griselda who is brought to live with her two aunts. There she becomes fascinated by a cuckoo clock upon which the happiness of the timeless old house is said to depend, and which proves to be a very unusual cuckoo clock indeed.
Marguerite, Lady Blakeney, is powerless to intervene as her husband Sir Percy walks into a trap.
Marguerite St Just, now Lady Blakeney, has followed her husband Sir Percy to France after discovering that that amiable idiot is none other than the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel, responsible for saving so many from the guillotine — including, she hopes, her brother Armand. Concealed behind a curtain in a dirty Calais café, she watches in horror as Citizen Chauvelin draws his net tight around the heedless aristocrat.
If officials in the Raj ever forgot who their boss was, they would bring the whole government down about their ears.
In Kipling’s short story, Aurelian McGoggin, a British bureaucrat, has been boring everyone in Shimla with his conviction that there is neither God nor Hereafter, so we can only worry along somehow for the good of Humanity. In a tongue-in-cheek aside, Kipling gave a Raj-shaped twist to an argument that had been made by political thinkers from Moses to Alexis de Tocqueville.
The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.
Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.
Jaikie has just graduated from Cambridge, and Alison wants to know what he has gained from his experience.
John ‘Jaikie’ Galt has taken Alison Westwater to dinner at a palatial London hotel to celebrate his graduation from St Mark’s College, Cambridge. Alison wants to know what Jaikie has learnt at University, and it isn’t anything found on a modular ‘Outcomes’ statement.