现代大学精读英语4 lesson seven课文(外语教学出版社).doc

Lesson 7 TEXT A Spring Sowing It was still dark when Martin Delaney and his wife Mary got up. Martin stood in his shirt by the window, rubbing his eyes and yawning, while Mary raked out the live coals that had lain hidden in the ashes onthe hearth all night. Outside, cocks were crowing and a white streak was rising form the ground, as it were, and beginning to scatter the darkness. It was a February morning, dry, cold and starry. The couple sat down to their breakfast of tea. bread and butter, in silence. They had only been married the previous autumn and it was hateful leaving a warm bed at such and early hour. Martin, with his brown hair and eyes, his freckled face and his little fair moustache, ooked too young to be married, and hsi wife looked hardly more than a girl, red-cheeked and blue-eyed,her black hair piled at the rear of her head with a large comb gleaming in the middle of the pile, Spanish fashion. They were both dressed in rough homespuns, and both wore the loose white shirt that Inverara speasants use for work in the fields. The ate in silence, sleepy and yet on fire with excitement, for it was the first day of their first spring sowing as man and wife. And each felt the glamour of that day on which they were to open up the earth together and plant seeds in it . But somehow the imminence of an event that had been long expected loved, feared and prepared for made them dejected. Mary, with her shrewd womans mind, thought of as many things as there are in life as a woman would in the first joy and anxiety of her mating. But Martins mind was fixed on one thought. Would he be able to prove himself a man worthy of being the head of a family by dong his spring sowing well? In the barn after breakfast, when they were getting the potato seeds and the line ofor measuring the tround and the spade, Martin fell over a basket in the half-darkness of the barn, he swore and said that a man would be better off dead than.. But before he could finish whatever he was gon