"THE SONG OF THE LARK" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

bound in padded leather and had been presented to the
Reverend Peter Kronborg by his Sunday-School class as
an ornament for his parlor table.

"Come into the office some day, and I'll lend you a nice
book. You can skip the parts you don't understand. You
can read it in vacation. Perhaps you'll be able to under-
stand all of it by then."

Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano.
"In vacation I have to practice four hours every day, and
then there'll be Thor to take care of." She pronounced it
"Tor."

"Thor? Oh, you've named the baby Thor?" exclaimed
the doctor.

Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly,
"That's a nice name, only maybe it's a little--old-
fashioned." She was very sensitive about being thought a
foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her
father always preached in English; very bookish English,
at that, one might add.

Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter
Kronborg had been sent to a small divinity school in
Indiana by the women of a Swedish evangelical mission,
who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and
begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth
through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swed-
ish to exhort and to bury the members of his country
church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moon-
stone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he
had learned out of books at college. He always spoke
of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc. The
poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If
he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticu-
late. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due

to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book-
learned language, wholly remote from anything personal,
native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her
own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial
English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive
ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in
monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was
tongue-tied. She was still inept in speech for a child so
intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she seldom