Чтение: задания 12 — 18

It’s no secret that Brixton, in the district of South London, has changed over the last decade. Once a neighborhood known for the shops, markets and food stalls of Brixton Village that reflected the cultural flavor of its multiracial residents, today in place of locally owned businesses, Brixton is increasingly populated with chain restaurants, trendy burger joints and organic wine bar pop-ups.

David Thorpe, the owner of Alkaline Juice Factory on Brixton Hill, said he barely recognizes Brixton Village anymore. “Ten years ago, Brixton Village was useful. I’d go down for the fruit and veg market inside Granville Arcade — the whole area was for shopping and hanging out — but it’s changed,” said Mr Thorpe, who was wearing jeans and a juice-stained shirt. In his small comer shop, he prides himself on offering Alkaline’s raw green juices at prices geared to the incomes of bom-and-bred Brixtonites. “It means locals who have lived here their whole lives can afford to come,” he said. “We get everyone — schoolkids, local gangsters wanting protein shakes, yoga types, pensioners and left-wing politicians.”

Lined with trees and grand Victorian buildings, many still boasting their original facades, Brixton Hill road is just five minutes from Brixton Village, between it and Streatham Hill. Its cheaper rents have made the street especially attractive to small businesses. “Rents are better here, but even if we did go into Brixton Village, there isn’t the local vibe that Brixton Hill has,” said Gus Mustafa, the owner of the Fish Lounge, a traditional fish and chips bar that opened there last September. “It’s only moments away from the centre of Brixton, but Brixton Hill has a slower pace.”

With picturesque landscapes and easy access to the center of London, Brixton Hill became a prosperous suburb in the 19th century. The road’s old mansions are still accompanied by 150 foot-long gardens. You can still see the old water pump station that once served the borough of Lambeth and the windmill that gave its name to one of London’s best-known music destinations. Small-business owners like the grass-roots energy of the area and hope that its increasing popularity won’t ruin its creative spirit. “Music has always been important to Brixton’s identity, but many of the original venues have been closed and replaced with private flats,” said Tony Reid, a pensioner who immigrated from Jamaica in the 1960s and has lived on a street off Brixton Hill ever since. “It’s the music and cultural history that made all the developers want to come to Brixton in the first place. On Brixton Hill that creative community spirit is still alive; this area is for real people.”

Francklin Evagle, the owner of Kata Kata, a vegetarian galette restaurant, has lived in the close-by neighborhood of Camberwell all his life and appreciates the authenticy of Brixton Hill. “My customers are local and happy to be in a place that is relaxed and fair with basic prices and honesty. That’s what this area is really good at, it’s honest.”

Kata Kata’s customers range from students to musicians, all vying for tables and vegan buckwheat pancakes with fillings with names such as Veggie Lovers and Caribbean Twist. Anticipating a spike in real estate prices, Mr Evagle said, “We know it’s going to go mad, landlords are greedy, but we want to keep Brixton Hill as it is. It should be the place where a 60 year-old resident can spend an afternoon across the table from a local politician.”

At that time the people of Britain would have been shocked to know that women were flying their most famous war plane. But the fact is that the ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary) had over 100 women pilots who delivered more than 300,000 air craft during the war. We had to fly the Spitfires from the factories and deliver them to airfields dotted around the south of England. Normally we would be flying in daylight with good visibility conditions. That is why we were never given instrument training as our instructors told us that with all the restrictions of war time, there was no time or money to spare for this luxury.

Occasionally we had to fly other aircraft — without any kind of additional training at all. Probably some high ranking, non-flying military official somewhere said that all aircraft were exactly the same to fly. Well — I can assure you that this is not true. With unfamiliar aircraft we had ten minutes to read an instruction booklet called the "Ferry Pilot Notes": And that was it. We had to climb in, fire up, taxi and then take off in completely unknown flying machines.

That particular day, the day I came so close to death, was my twenty first birthday. I had no cake or candles that day and my two friends and myself shared some chocolate— the only luxury available in those days. We drank apple juice, and ate apples and cheese. We entertained ourselves with silly stories. But at one solemn moment we also made a toast to absent friends and remembered the girls who had died delivering aircraft.

In the morning we were driven to the factory and my worst fears were realized. Instead of a lovely new and familiar Spitfire I had a bulky Torpedo bomber. We all hated these as several had crashed without any clear reason why. I was able to take the Ferry Pilot Notes into the canteen and studied them over breakfast. I had a very uneasy feeling in my stomach which had nothing to do with the breakfast I was consuming. I had birthday kisses from the other girls but it only made me feel worse.

At about 111 was given my flight plan and it was time to go. I looked at the sky. There was a strange quality to the light that I didn't like and I was worried. With no instrument training, fog or mist made flying incredibly dangerous and absolutely terrifying. With a heavy heart I fired up the engine.

Within 20 minutes I was approaching the river Forth. But I couldn't see the river as clouds thickened up around me. I took the aircraft lower and lower looking for a glimpse of the ground. At one point I was sure that I was virtually at ground level but I couldn't see a thing. It was too dangerous to continue. I could hear my heart beating even over the roar of the engine.

When it happened — it happened really quickly. The plane hit water. I didn't see anything. I was thrown against my straps — and then a flood of cold seawater in my eyes and mouth. I was a mile out to sea!

I was certain I was going to die. Funnily enough — I was perfectly calm. I even thought that my ATA insurance payment would really be a big help to my Mother. But then survival instinct kicked in. I was still alive — and close to shore. I had no life jacket or any survival gear but I was a good swimmer. I was certain there were no bones broken and I didn't have to swim far. I was picked up by a fishing boat that I had narrowly missed in the fog. And in the end I got a real birthday drink after all — a cup of spiced, dark rum.

The public school in town served a number of purposes. Education, of course, was one. It offered a curriculum in general education, manual education, and preparatory education for college. Its music and sports programs provided entertainment to the school and its patrons. And the school served as an agency of social cohesion, bringing the community together in a common effort in which everyone took pride.

The sports program was the center of gravity of extra-curricular activities. The school fielded junior and senior varsity teams in football, basketball and track. Any young man with enough coordination to walk and chew gum at the same time could find a place on one of those teams. In addition, sports generated a need for pep rallies, cheerleaders, a band, homecoming activities, parades and floats, a homecoming queen and maids of honor, and a sports banquet. It also mobilized parents to support the activities with time and money.

There were any number of clubs a student might join. Some were related to academics, like the Latin Club, the Spanish Club, and the Science Club. Others brought together students interested in a profession, like the Future Farmers of America, the Future Homemakers of America, the Future Teachers of America, and the Pre-Med Club. Still others were focused on service. The Intra-Mural Council, made up of girls (who had been neglected in the regular sports program), organized tournaments in a variety of sports for girls. The Library Club worked to improve library holdings and equipment. The Pep Club organized homecoming activities, parades and athletic banquets.

The Student Council, including representatives from each class, was elected by the student body after a heated political campaign with banners and speeches. It represented student interests to the administration and the school board. It approved student clubs that were formed, helped resolve discipline problems, and played a role in setting codes of conduct and dress. For the most part, it was a docile body that approved the policies of the administration.

The Journalism Club published a monthly newspaper of school news and opinion. It was financed by selling ads to business men in the community.

Another group planned and published the school Yearbook, which was a pictorial record of the student body, the year's activities, sports, and achievements. The Yearbook staff sponsored a beauty contest, pictured outstanding students selected by the faculty, and a Who's Who of popular and talented students selected by the student body.

Churches in town, of which there were many, sponsored their own activities for youth; and the community sponsored a recreation center, called Teen Town, for chaperoned Saturday night dances each week. Community and school leaders seemed determined to keep the youth of the town busy and out of trouble. In a small Southern town in the Bible Belt where very few students had access to a car, which had been voted dry and in which no alcohol was sold, they succeeded marvelously well.

Before setting up his new business, Peter Yang made a point of bothering everyone he sat next to on his 75-minute commute to work. “I’d just ask whoever happened to be sitting next to me if they ever thought of paying someone to write their resume for them,” he says. “A lot of people didn’t have a great grasp of how to optimize them, so it seemed promising.” Yang, is now the co-founder of ResumeGo, a CV writing company that he started in 2015. He says that if it wasn’t for his long journey from his home in New Jersey to his then full-time job in New York, it would have taken far longer for the business to get off the ground.

For nearly a year, Yang would either talk to people on his train about his business, think about how to create his company or chat with his future business partner over the phone — who was also commuting at the same time, but on a different train. “The commute helped me to dedicate a certain chunk of my day to working on the business,” he says.

Most of us are probably not as productive as Yang on the way to work, but we may want to make better use of our time. In America, the average commute is 26.4 minutes, up 21 % from 1980, while commuters in London and Manchester spend about 85 minutes a day getting to and from work. The rising cost of living in major cities like New York, London and Beijing has forced many people out into the surrounding areas, giving them little choice but to commute long distances to the office each day. In Beijing the average commute is about an hour.

Rather than staring at our phones, we could use that time to upgrade our skills, start new companies, learn new languages and more. That’s precisely what Mark Smith did on his hour-long journey from Haddenhan in Buckinghamshire to London, where he worked in the Department of Transport.

For years, Smith would pass the time by reading but, one day in 2001, rather than picking up another page turner, he bought a book on HTML — a computer language that’s used to create websites. It took him two days of commuting to finish the book, after which he built a one-page website, explaining how to get from London to various European cities by train. It’s a subject he’s passionate about — he loves to travel, but says there was a lack of information on train travel between England and Europe. When the Guardian newspaper named his site the best travel site of the week in May 2001, he knew he was onto something.

A few months later. Smith purchased a laptop and began building more pages during his commute. In time, he stared earning a decent income from the site and in 2007 he quit his job to run it full-time.

It’s one thing to want to be productive but it’s another to get meaningful work done. Smith, though, had no trouble. Despite sharing personal space with strangers, there were fewer interruptions than at his office and no one was calling him to talk, he says. He does add, though, that a 30-minute trip wouldn’t have been enough — he needed the full hour.

To make the most out of your commute, you should do two things: plan and be realistic. Those who think about exactly what they want to accomplish can focus better than those who don’t have an idea of what they want to do. It’s also important to be realistic about your time and your environment, she says. If you need to concentrate, the busy morning commute may not be the best place to do that kind of work. If you get a comfortable seat on the train, though, and know you can spend 40 minutes writing a chapter of a book, then it can be a good way to get extra work in.

In some heavily multilingual areas of the world, most people learn a lingua franca - a regional trade language in addition to their mother tongue. But when someone proposes English or French say, as a trade language, objections inevitably arise. These languages are notoriously difficult to learn with strange spellings and numerous grammatical rules and exceptions. But more importantly, they’re loaded with historical and cultural baggage. The only hope for a truly universal language would seem to he an artificial one a language that is designed to be free from cultural biases and easy to learn This was precisely the goal of Esperanto.

L. L. Zarnenhof grew up in the late 1800s in Warsaw, which was a part of Russia at that time. While still in high school he set out to design a universal artificial language that would facilitate communication within his linguistically diverse community. By the time he finished this side project ten years later, Zamenhof was a practicing ophthalmologist. In 1887, Zamenhof published the first guide in RUssian to the new language, which he called “Lingvo Internacia”, meaning “international language''. Zamenhоf wrote the textbook under the pseudonym “Esperanto,” meaning ''a person who is hoping'' in Lingvo Internacia. Fans of the language decided that “Esperanto” had a nicer ring to it, and they soon adopted it as the informal name of the language.

Esperantо was designed to be both easy to learn and culturally neutral. According to some sources, an English speaker can learn Esperanto up to five times faster than Spanish. For starters, Esperanto uses strictly phonetic spelling - a given letter always makes exactly the same sound. Second, the structure оf Esperanto is very simple, with only sixteen basic grammatical rules that need to be learned - and no exceptions to the rules such as irregular verbs. And third, Esperanto has a very small core vocabulary, new words are constructed by combining words and adding prefixes and suffixes.

The vocabulary of Esperanto will have a familiar ring to anyone who knows a European language, as roots were borrowed from French, German, and Spanish, among other languages. For examples: ''bona'' means ''good'' ; ''porko'' means “pig”; “filo” means “son”; “hundo” means “dog.” One could argue that this selection represents not so much cultural neutrality as Euro-neutrality, but this hasn’t prevented Esperanto from becoming popular in China and some other parts of Asia.

For all its merits, Esperanto has not reached the level of acceptance its creator foresaw more than a century ago. There may be as many as two million people who speak Esperanto with at least a moderate level of proficiency, but probably no more than a few hundred who learned Esperanto at home as their first language and no known speakers over the age of three or so who speak only Esperanto. Ironically, the cultural neutrality that is touted as such a benefit of the language also serves to limit its growth, because languages tend to spread with the cultures that gave rise to them. Alas, unless or until the number of Esperanto speakers reaches a larger critical mass, it will be of little value as a trade language, and without a clear value, it will be difficult to convince people to learn it.

Llandudno is truly a fine and handsome place, built on a generously proportioned bay and lined along its broad front with a huddle of prim but gracious nineteenth-century hotels that reminded me in the fading light of a lineup of Victorian nannies. Llandudno was purpose-built as a resort in the mid-1800s, and it cultivates a nice old-fashioned air. I don’t suppose that Lewis Carroll, who famously strolled this front with little Alice Liddell in the 1860s, would notice a great deal of change today.

To my consternation, the town was packed with weekending pensioners. Buses from all over were parked along the side streets, every hotel I called at was full, and in every dining room I could see crowds – veritable oceans – of nodding white heads spooning soup and conversing happily. Goodness knows what had brought them to the Welsh seaside at this bleak time of year.

Farther on along the front there stood a clutch of guesthouses, large and virtually indistinguishable, and a few of them had vacancy signs in their windows. I had eight or ten to choose from, which always puts me in a mild fret because I have an unerring instinct for choosing badly. My wife can survey a row of guesthouses and instantly identify the one run by a white-haired widow with a fondness for children, and sparkling bathroom facilities, whereas I can generally count on choosing the one run by a guy with a grasping manner, and the sort of cough that makes you wonder where he puts the phlegm. Such, I felt, would be the case tonight.

All the guesthouses had boards out front listing their many amenities – COLOUR TV, HOSPITALITY TRAYS, FULL CENTRAL HEATING, and the coyly euphemistic EN SUITE ALL ROOMS, meaning private bathrooms. One place offered satellite TV and a trouser press, and another boasted CURRENT FIRE CERTIFICATE – something I had never thought to look for in a B&B. All this heightened my sense of unease and doom. How could I possibly choose intelligently among such a variety of options?

I selected a place that looked reasonable enough from the outside – its board promised a color TV and coffee making facilities, about all I require these days for a Saturday night – but from the moment I set foot in the door I knew it was a bad choice. I was about to turn and flee when the owner emerged from a back room and stopped my retreat with an unenthusiastic “Yes?” A short conversation revealed that a single room with breakfast was for £19.50. It was entirely out of the question that I would stay the night in such a dismal place at such an exorbitant price, so I said, “That sounds fine,” and signed in. Well, it’s so hard to say no.

My room was everything I expected it to be – cold and cheerless with laminated furniture, grubbily matted carpet, and those mysterious ceiling stains that bring to mind a neglected corpse in the room above. There was a tray of coffee things but the cups were disgusting, and the spoon was stuck to the tray. The bathroom, faintly illuminated by a distant light activated by a length of string, had curling floor tiles and years of accumulated dirt packed into every corner. I peered at the yellowy tile around the bath and sink and realized what the landlord did with his phlegm. A bath was out of the question, so I threw some cold water on my face, dried it with a towel that had the texture of shredded wheat, and gladly took my leave.

Robb Wilier is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California. Berkeley. He recently co-authored a paper called The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial Behaviour, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His research has proved that some kinds of gossip are altruistic and beneficial to society. No matter how fundamental his research is, many people find it difficult to accept such an opinion.

Research has been going on for several years about the ways in which fears for reputation encourage people to behave. This led to get interested in gossip because gossip involves spreading reputational information about people in groups. More specifically, the authors were interested in an apparent tension between the bad reputation gossiping and gossipers have, but how there’s a lot of ways gossip has useful social functions.

In the first study, they attached participants to heart-rate monitors and monitored their emotional reactions to events they observed in the lab. One thing they observed was people doing economic exercises based on trust. The researchers arranged so they would observe someone behaving in unthrustworthy way repeatedly; then the participants would have a chance to warn someone else they thought would have to interact with that person next.

People very readly warned the next person, passing on socially useful information to them. But what was more interesting was the emotional register of the behaviour. As people saw a person behave in an untrustworthy way, they became frustrated and their heart rate increased. But when they had the opportunity to pass a warning on, that reduced or eliminated their frustration and also tempered their increased heart rate. It is prosocial gossip that involves warning other people about untrustworthy others. It is pretty common, onerous people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a need to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to spoil another s reputation or advance oneself.

So why does gossip have such a bad reputation? This research has just sharpened that question. Why would it be that gossip, which we need to function socially in order to keep people behaving a bit better than they might otherwise, has a negative reputation? It could be that we don’t need gossip to have a positive reputation for people to do it. Even the people who pass judgment on gossipers are gossiping as they do so. It may be that socially we’re wired to gossip. Evolutionary theorists have argued that language evolved in part to facilitate gossip, so we’ve developed these social norms against excessive or malicious gossip to keep the system from getting out of hand. News in a lot of ways is dignified gossip. A broad definition of gossip would include the news. I wonder how many journalists would agree with or share such interpretation of news and their role in a society?

It s very important that we discriminate between different kinds of gossip and the people who do it. The kind where you warn people about untrustworthy others is valid, so we shouldn’t feel bad about that.

“Buy land — they aren’t making it any more,” quipped Mark Twain. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.

The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion. Bom in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. “We are not machines,” she said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership — this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. The inspiration began with a book that her father, the anti-monopolist politician James Magie, had handed to her. In the pages of Henry George’s classic, Progress and Poverty (1879), she encountered his conviction that “the equal right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence.” Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property, and the game was won when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there — and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner.

The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences” and hence to understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. “It might well have been called ‘The Game of Life’, ‘remarked Magie’, “as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, for example, the accumulation of wealth.”

The game was soon a hit among Left-wing intellectuals, on college campuses including the Wharton School, Harvard and Columbia, and also among Quaker communities, some of which modified the rules and redrew the board with street names from Atlantic City. Among the players of this Quaker adaptation was an unemployed man called Charles Darrow, who later sold such a modified version to the games company Parker Brothers as his own.

Once the game’s true origins came to light, Parker Brothers bought up Magie’s patent, but then re-launched the board game simply as Monopoly, and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all. Worse, they marketed it along with the claim that the game’s inventor was Darrow, who they said had dreamed it up in the 1930s, sold it to Parker Brothers, and become a millionaire. It was a rags-to-riches fabrication that ironically exemplified Monopoly’s implicit values: chase wealth and crush your opponents if you want to come out on top.

So next time someone invites you to join a game of Monopoly, here’s a thought. As you set out piles for the Chance and Community Chest cards, establish a third pile for Land-Value Tax, to which every property owner must contribute each time they charge rent to a fellow player. How high should that land tax be? And how should the resulting tax receipts be distributed? Such questions will no doubt lead to fiery debate around the Monopoly board — but then that is exactly what Magie had always hoped for.

I went to school in a large village called Kimbolton in the county of Cambridgeshire. In recent years I have been reminded of my time there by, strangely enough, the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. The first and most obvious reason is that Kimbolton is a castle school; just as Hogwarts is the castle school for Harry and his friends.

Hogwarts is of course filled with ghosts, such as Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington — better known as Nearly Headless Nick: But Kimbolton also has a reputation for being haunted and in fact lays claim to a very famous ghost. This is Katherine of Aragon — the first wife of Henry VTH. She was sent there in April 1634 after refusing to accept the legality of Henry's divorce proceedings. When I arrived there as a first year in September 1971, I was told that her ghost was often seen — but only from the knees upwards. This, I was told, was because she walked on the original rather than the later modern floors. I am ashamed to confess that at times we set up "ghostly" tricks to scare our friends. These usually involved almost invisible fishing lines being used to "mysteriously" open and close cupboards or move chairs.

There are other comparisons to be made however. In Harry Potter's Hogwarts School there are four "houses"; Gryfinndor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and the dark house, Slytherin. The four houses being named after famous headmasters of Hogwarts' past. At Kimbolton we also had four houses named for the same reason. They were called Ingram's, Bailey's, Dawson's and Gibbard's. As I recall there were no sinister connotations with any house although probably the Slytherin equivalent was Gibbard's. At the time Gibbard's was the house for "day boys" who lived at home and travelled to school each day. The other houses were for the "borders" that lived in the castle. The dayboys were nicknamed "day bugs" and the residents were called "border bugs". I was a day bug.

There were common rooms and detentions which I suppose all schools still have. But few schools, like Kimbolton, have narrow, long corridors lined with portraits whose eyes seem to follow you round! Mind you — none of our paintings spoke to us as they sometimes do at Hogwarts! Kimbolton also has a fantastic staircase in the castle and huge murals by the Italian Rococo painter Pellegrini.

Apart from the castle, ghosts and houses there were other comparisons to Hogwarts. The teachers (who were called masters) also wore black gowns and addressed us only by our surnames. We pupils had to wear suits and ties to school and actually were not allowed to take our jackets off unless the day was exceptionally hot. But there were some fairly important differences too.

Firstly Kimbolton, at the time I was there, was a school only for boys. It has changed since, but then we had no Hermione Grangers to fight against evil with. We played football and cricket rather than Quidditch and took 'O' Levels rather than OWLS. That is "Ordinary" Level exams rather than "Ordinary Wizarding Levels". But still, looking back on it all, I have to say that I, at least, thought the place was rather magical.

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth- bank, where a dim and little travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun.

The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was unbroken white, save for a dark hairline that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hair-line was the trail, the main trail, that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.

But all this the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all-made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. Fifty degrees below zero stood forte bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.

As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below, but how much colder he did not know. But the temperature did not matter. He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek country, while he had come the roundabout way to take; a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He would be into camp by six o’clock; a bit after dark, it was true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot supper would be ready. As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the protruding bundle under his jacket. It was also under his shirt, wrapped up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the only way to keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon.

He plunged in among the big spruce trees. The trail was faint. A foot of snow had fallen since the last sled had passed over, and he was glad he was without a sled, travelling light. In fact, he carried nothing but the lunch wrapped in the handkerchief. He was surprised, however, at the cold. It certainly was cold, he concluded as he rubbed his numb nose and cheekbones with his mittened hand. He was a warm-whiskered man, but the hair on his face did not protect the high cheek-bones and the eager nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air.