The Egg — Vocabulary
Sherwood Anderson
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Grotesques are born out of eggs as out of people.†2 more

As so often happens in life he had thought so much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was somewhat nervous in its presence.†1 more

He was angry because his visitor did not watch him as he began to do his trick, but nevertheless went cheerfully to work.†

My tale does not primarily concern itself with the hen.†

We did not talk much, but in our daily lives tried earnestly to make smiles take the place of glum looks.†

Now that I am older I know that she had another motive in going.†

When he thought that at last the trick was about to be consummated the delayed train came in at the station and Joe Kane started to go nonchalantly out at the door.†

Father became a little feverish in his anxiety to please.†

He decided that he had in the past been an unsuccessful man because he had not been cheerful enough and that in the future he would adopt a cheerful outlook on life.†

Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one leg.†

In an outburst of generosity he fairly compelled Joe Kane to have a fresh cup of coffee and another cigar at his expense.†

It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies.†

We must have been a sad looking lot, not, I fancy, unlike refugees fleeing from a battlefield.†

From the beginning they were impressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.†

Afire with the showman's passion and at the same time a good deal disconcerted by the failure of his first effort, father now took the bottles containing the poultry monstrosities down from their place on the shelf and began to show them to his visitor.†

One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned.†

He was then a bald-headed man of forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother and the chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged.

I, however, digress.†

My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the duplicity of Christopher Columbus.

He noticed that the restaurant keeper was apparently disturbed by his presence and he thought of going out.†