Four little children who went round the world
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Fables and talesLear’s island with a single tall treeEdward Lear, published 1871The children reach an island made of water surrounded by earth, with one tree on it.medium335 characters
Fables and talesThe Fox and the GrapesAesop, published 1867A famished fox tries every trick to reach the grapes, then calls them sour.medium303 characters
ProseLittle Women, the gray dawn of ChristmasLouisa May Alcott, published 1868Jo wakes early on Christmas morning and finds the gift her mother promised.easy363 characters
Edward Lear published this prose tale in 1871 in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, the book that also carried The Owl and the Pussy-cat. Lear earned his living as a natural history artist and drew parrots for the Zoological Society of London before he was twenty-five. His nonsense books made the limerick popular in English after A Book of Nonsense of 1846. The four children sail with a cat to steer and a Quangle-Wangle to cook.
Where this text comes fromThis is nonsense written as travel writing. The sentence reports a voyage in the calm, itemizing manner of a Victorian expedition account, and the absurdity comes from applying that register to things that cannot exist. Lear made his living drawing birds and animals from life, which is probably why his invented creatures are described with the same steady attention as real ones, and why the prose never signals that anything odd is happening.
What you might not noticeA capitalized invented creature appears in the passage, its name built from two rhyming halves joined by a hyphen, and it is introduced without explanation as though the reader should already know what one is. Source
What it trainsSixty-six words in one sentence, with five commas, two semicolons, a colon and two hyphens in 352 characters. That is four different dividing marks in a short space and only one of them, the colon, needs Shift. The invented name is fourteen characters with a hyphen in the middle and a capital on each half, so it needs two Shift presses and a hyphen inside one word. Five capitals in total, four of them inside the sentence.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1871, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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