Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 5

I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it as we too may have been somewhat to blame.

Youth is impulsive.

When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.

They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant-lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender, fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the Happy Hunting Ground to visit, guide, console and comfort them.

They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant-lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender, fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the Happy Hunting Ground to visit, guide, console and comfort them.

It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days.

Grim fate seems to be on the red man’s trail, and wherever he goes he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the white man whose God walked and talked with him as friend with friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

Children, fishermen, tourists, hotels, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water as high as a house unleashed by the earthquake.

President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who is on holiday in England, has declared a national emergency and appealed to the international community for help.

The first many coastal residents knew of the tidal wave that would engulf the island’s entire southern and eastern seaboard was when the area was shaken by a massive tremor at about 8 a.m. yesterday.

Sri Lanka’s southern coast is heavily built up with small towns and tourist resorts nestled along the length of the winding beach road from Colombo southward.

On the East Coast, which bore the brunt of the tidal wave, rescue efforts will be hampered by bad roads and an infrastructure devastated by 20 years of civil war.

And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.

So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange.