To-night it was fogged in the grey smoke of its own wood fires, with here and there on its windows the lemon green of the sky. It smelled faintly of wood-smoke, sweet mud and standing6 rain, of rot in lathes7 and tiles. The Horselunges, the cottage where the minister lodged8, was the first house in the village after the forge. It stood opposite the Bethel, a brick, eighteenth-century building with big gaunt windows staring blindly over the fields to Puddledock. The Bethel had been built in Georgian days when the Particular Baptists flourished in greater numbers round Sunday Street, and a saint of theirs had built it to “the glory of God and in memory of my dear wife Susannah Odlarne, saved by Grace. For Many are called but Few are chosen.”
Mr. Sumption and Tom had walked the last of their way in silence. But the minister’s anger had fizzled out as quickly as it had kindled9, and at the door of the forge he held out his hand very kindly10 to the boy.
“Well, good-night to you, lad. I must look in and see Bourner here for a minute or two. I hope your mother won’t be much distressed11 at your news.”
“Reckon she will, but it can’t be helped.... Funny, you doan’t hear the guns down here.”
“No more you do, but they’re going it just the same—knocking away little farms.”
Tom nodded with a wry12 smile and walked off. The minister turned into the forge.
Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from Galleybird or Harebeating, or even [19] from the doors of sick people—if they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son.
His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof13-parings and the ring of smitten14 iron. His sketchy15 education finished, he had taken his place beside his father at the anvil16—he had held the meek17 tasselled hoofs18 of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows19 that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment20 Day, he had swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent.
But during his adolescence21 strange things had grown with his bulk and girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching22 flames he came to see the presage23 of that day which should burn like an oven, the burning fiery24 furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment25 a form of use. When the horse clumped26 out of the smithy with the new iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of God passed through fire into service.
He became “queer.” He spoke27 his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered28 at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel29 took him up. He thought he had found a rustic30 saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry31. The parents were flattered by the pastor32’s notice, and he found little [20] difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.
Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra Sumption, comely33, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect34, and emerged a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech. He was a great disappointment to his benefactor35, for the smith in him had triumphantly36 survived all genteel training and theological examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness37, his “queerness” remained as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity of his forge-born similes38, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate39 and fume40 of the old Doomsday doctrines41 which were fast dying out of Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself.
In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood, where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her, as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both miserable42 for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They returned to the forge at [21] Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual restless yearning43 of the Word within him, that drop of the divine which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.
At the close of the year Meridian44 Sumption died at the birth of her child. They had been ideally happy in their short married life, in spite of the cage-bars of circumstances and the drivings of the Word which divided them as in the beginning it had divided the waters from the earth. After her death he became “queerer” than ever. He roamed from village to village, preaching to farmers, gipsies, labourers, tinkers, all who would hear him and some who would not—leaving his child in his mother’s care.
Six years later the death of his father and mother made it necessary that he should take the boy—named grotesquely45 Jeremiah Meridian, as if to show his double origin in religion and vagabondage. At the same time his first patron, the minister of Bethersden, offered to recommend him for the pastorate of the Particular Baptist Chapel at Sunday Street near Dallington. His conscience had long grieved over the vagaries46 of his blacksmith saint, and in this empty pastorate he saw a way of settling both. Sumption had acquired a certain fame as a preacher among the ’dens of Kent, candidates for the Particular Ministry were not so many as they used to be, and the pastorate of Sunday Street, with its dwindling47, bumpkin congregation, country loneliness, and small revenues, was hard to fill. After various difficulties, the new minister arrived with his black-eyed, swarthy child. He had grown tired of his wanderings, and had conceived an erratic48, arbitrary affection for this pledge of gipsy love. He looked forward to a settled country life and to preaching the Word in his own Bethel.
[22]
The villagers, for the most part, liked him. His manners offended them, and as they were mostly Church-people they seldom came to his chapel except on wet Sundays, when it meant too much dirt and trouble to go to hear old Mr. Foxe at Dallington or young Mr. Poullett-Smith at Brownbread Street. But from the first he was as one of themselves, treated with no respect and much kindness. He was seldom invited to sick-beds or to officiate at funerals or marriages, but he never lacked an invitation to a Harvest Supper or Farmers’ Club Dinner. For his sake the neighbourhood tolerated the villainies of his Jerry, a throw-back to the poaching, roving, thieving Rossarmescroes. None the less, they were glad when at the outbreak of war he went to work in a munition49 factory, first in London, then, through a series of not very creditable wanderings, to Erith. Only the minister grieved, for he loved Jerry as he had loved no human thing since his mother died in the little apple-smelling room above the smithy. He was not always kind to the boy, and the arm which had wielded50 the hammer so lustily had on one or two shocking occasions nearly broken the bones he loved. But he had for his son a half-spiritual, half-animal affection, and the villagers pitied him when the boy went, though they were glad to see him go.
“Mus’ Sumption wur more blacksmith nor he wur minister,” they said when any local enthusiasm for him prevailed; and it was true that in his loneliness and anxiety he would often find comfort in the forge at Sunday Street, where he could sit and watch Bourner the smith swing his hammer, or even sometimes himself, with coat thrown off and shirt-sleeves rolled back over arms long and hairy as a gorilla’s, smite51 the hot iron or scrape the patient hoof, while his face grew red as copper52 in the firelight and the sweat ran over it and his shaggy chest.
[23]
To-night, when Jerry had wounded him afresh, he turned to his unfailing refuge. His pain was not the mere53 dread54 of death or maiming of the lad—it was something more sinister55, more intangible. “The army is not for the gipsy woman’s son.” He feared for Jerry in that organised system of rank and order and command. He would have preferred him in the workshop even if the relative danger of the two places had been reversed. Jerry was less likely to be smashed by a German shell than by the system in which he had enrolled56 himself. He would break his head against its discipline, hang himself in its rules.... His dread for Jerry under martial57 law was the dread his Meridian’s ancestors would have felt for her under a roof. It was a fear based more on instinct than on reason, therefore all the more bruising58 to the instinctive59 passion of fatherhood. It was well that he had this refuge of iron and anvil, of hammer and hoof, this small comforting similitude of the day which should burn as an oven.... Bourner the smith did not talk to him much. He made a few technical remarks, and winked60 at his mate when Mr. Sumption boasted of Jerry’s valour in joining the army. But gradually the tired, careworn61 look on the minister’s face died away, his eyes ceased to smoulder and roll; in the thick stuffy62 atmosphere, strong with the smell of hoofs and the ammoniacal smell of hide and horses, grey with smoke and noisy with the roar of flames and the ring of iron, he was going back in peace to his father’s house, to the smithy at the throws by Bethersden, before the burdens of divine and human love had come down upon him.
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1
manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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2
streak
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| n.条理，斑纹，倾向，少许，痕迹；v.加条纹，变成条纹，奔驰，快速移动 | |
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3
squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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4
spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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5
crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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6
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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7
lathes
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| 车床( lathe的名词复数 ) | |
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8
lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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9
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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10
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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11
distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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12
wry
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| adj.讽刺的；扭曲的 | |
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13
hoof
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| n.(马，牛等的)蹄 | |
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14
smitten
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| 猛打，重击，打击( smite的过去分词 ) | |
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15
sketchy
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| adj.写生的，写生风格的，概略的 | |
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16
anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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17
meek
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| adj.温顺的，逆来顺受的 | |
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18
hoofs
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| n.（兽的）蹄，马蹄( hoof的名词复数 )v.（兽的）蹄，马蹄( hoof的第三人称单数 ) | |
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19
bellows
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| n.风箱；发出吼叫声，咆哮（尤指因痛苦）( bellow的名词复数 )；（愤怒地）说出（某事），大叫v.发出吼叫声，咆哮（尤指因痛苦）( bellow的第三人称单数 )；（愤怒地）说出（某事），大叫 | |
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20
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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21
adolescence
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| n.青春期，青少年 | |
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22
belching
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| n. 喷出，打嗝 动词belch的现在分词形式 | |
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23
presage
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| n.预感，不祥感；v.预示 | |
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24
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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25
torment
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| n.折磨；令人痛苦的东西(人)；vt.折磨；纠缠 | |
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26
clumped
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| adj.[医]成群的v.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的过去式和过去分词 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声 | |
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27
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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28
jeered
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| v.嘲笑( jeer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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29
chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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30
rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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31
ministry
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| n.(政府的)部；牧师 | |
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32
pastor
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| n.牧师，牧人 | |
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33
comely
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| adj.漂亮的，合宜的 | |
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34
sect
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| n.派别，宗教，学派，派系 | |
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35
benefactor
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| n. 恩人，行善的人，捐助人 | |
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36
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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37
uncouthness
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38
similes
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| （使用like或as等词语的）明喻( simile的名词复数 ) | |
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39
spate
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| n.泛滥，洪水，突然的一阵 | |
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40
fume
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| n.(usu pl.)(浓烈或难闻的)烟，气，汽 | |
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41
doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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42
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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43
yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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44
meridian
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| adj.子午线的；全盛期的 | |
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45
grotesquely
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| adv. 奇异地,荒诞地 | |
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46
vagaries
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| n.奇想( vagary的名词复数 )；异想天开；异常行为；难以预测的情况 | |
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47
dwindling
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| adj.逐渐减少的v.逐渐变少或变小( dwindle的现在分词 ) | |
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48
erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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49
munition
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| n.军火；军需品；v.给某部门提供军火 | |
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50
wielded
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| 手持着使用（武器、工具等）( wield的过去式和过去分词 )； 具有； 运用（权力）； 施加（影响） | |
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51
smite
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| v.重击；彻底击败；n.打；尝试；一点儿 | |
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52
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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53
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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54
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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55
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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56
enrolled
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| adj.入学登记了的v.[亦作enrol]( enroll的过去式和过去分词 )；登记，招收，使入伍（或入会、入学等），参加，成为成员；记入名册；卷起，包起 | |
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57
martial
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| adj.战争的，军事的，尚武的，威武的 | |
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58
bruising
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| adj.殊死的；十分激烈的v.擦伤(bruise的现在分词形式) | |
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59
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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60
winked
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| v.使眼色( wink的过去式和过去分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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61
careworn
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| adj.疲倦的，饱经忧患的 | |
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62
stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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