Sample
from
Three Men in a Boat
by
Jerome K. Jerome
Oxford Progressive English Readers
Grade 5
retold by
David Foulds
A Complete Change
On the matter of camping out, however, Harris was right. Imagine: it is evening. It has been raining all day long, and you are wet through. There is a good two inches of water in the boat and all your things are damp. You find a place on the bank that does not have quite so many puddles as the others you have seen. You land. Two of you pull the tent out of the boat, and try to put it up.
The tent is wet and heavy. The wind is blowing. Bits of rope and canvas fly about and fall on you and stick to you and make you mad. The rain keeps coming down. The other man is no help at all. He is a complete fool. Just when you get your end of the tent beautifully set up, he pulls hard from his end and spoils it all.
'Here, what do you think you are doing?' you call out.
'What are you doing?' he replies. 'Let go, can't you?'
'Don't pull like that; you've got it all wrong, you stupid donkey,' you shout.
'No, I haven't,' he yells back. 'Let go of your side.'
'I tell you, you've got it all wrong!' you roar. Then you give your side of the tent a great pull, just to make sure everything is all right, and his pegs fly out.
'Oh, the half-brained idiot!' you hear him say to himself, and then comes a great pull on the tent from his side, and all your pegs go flying out. You start to go round to his end of the tent to tell him what you think about the whole business. At the same time, he starts round on the other side, to come and explain his ideas to you. You follow each other round and round swearing and cursing at one another until the tent falls down completely. You look at each other across a pile of wet canvas and both shout at the same moment:
"There you are! Didn't I say you had got it all wrong?"
More of this story in
Three Men in a Boat
by
Jerome K. Jerome
Oxford Progressive English Readers
Grade 5
ISBN 0 19 586 321 6
This text is copyright Oxford University Press 1994.
If you can read this sample easily, you can enjoy any Oxford Progressive English Reader.
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