Chapter 14

Macfarlane(Written about 1898)

When I was turned twenty I wandered to Cincinnati, and was there several months. Our boarding-house crew was made up of commonplace people of various ages and both sexes. They were full of bustle¹, frivolity², chatter³, and the joy of life, and were good-natured, clean-minded, and well-meaning; but they were oppressively uninteresting, for all that--with one exception. This was Macfarlane, a Scotchman. He was forty years old--just double my age--but we were opposite in most ways and comrades from the start. I always spent my evenings by the wood fire in his room, listening in comfort to his tireless talk and to the dulled complainings of the winter storms, until the clock struck ten. At that hour he grilled⁴ a smoked herring, after the fashion of an earlier friend in Philadelphia, the Englishman Sumner. His herring was his nightcap and my signal to go.
He was six feet high and rather lank⁵, a serious and sincere man. He had no humor, nor any comprehension of it. He had a sort of smile, whose office was to express his good nature, but if I ever heard him laugh, the memory of it is gone from me. He was intimate with no one in the house but me, though he was courteous⁶ and pleasant with all. He had two or three dozen weighty books--philosophies, histories, and scientific works--and at the head of this procession were his Bible and his dictionary. After his herring he always read two or three hours in bed.
Diligent⁷ talker as he was, he seldom said anything about himself. To ask him a personal question gave him no offense--nor the asker any information; he merely turned the matter aside and flowed placidly⁹ on about other things. He told me once that he had had hardly any schooling¹⁰, and that such learning as he had, he had picked up for himself. That was his sole biographical revelation, I believe. Whether he was bachelor, widower¹¹, or grass widower, remained his own secret. His clothes were cheap, but neat and caretakingly preserved. Ours was a cheap boarding house; he left the house at six, mornings, and returned to it toward six, evenings; his hands were not soft, so I reasoned that he worked at some mechanical calling ten hours a day, for humble¹² wages--but I never knew. As a rule, technicalities of a man's vocation¹³, and figures and metaphors¹⁴ drawn¹⁵ from it, slip out in his talk and reveal his trade; but if this ever happened in Macfarlane's case I was none the wiser, although I was constantly on the watch during half a year for those very betrayals. It was mere⁸ curiosity, for I didn't care what his trade was, but I wanted to detect it in true detective fashion and was annoyed because I couldn't do it. I think he was a remarkable¹⁶ man, to be able to keep the shop out of his talk all that time.
There was another noteworthy feature about him: he seemed to know his dictionary from beginning to end. He claimed that he did. He was frankly¹⁷ proud of this accomplishment¹⁸ and said I would not find it possible to challenge him with an English word which he could not promptly¹⁹ spell and define. I lost much time trying to hunt up a word which would beat him, but those weeks were spent in vain and I finally gave it up; which made him so proud and happy that I wished I had surrendered earlier.
He seemed to be as familiar with his Bible as he was with his dictionary. It was easy to see that he considered himself a philosopher and a thinker. His talk always ran upon grave and large questions; and I must do him the justice to say that his heart and conscience were in his talk and that there was no appearance of reasoning and arguing for the vain pleasure of hearing himself do it.
Of course his thinking and reasoning and philosophizings were those of a but partly taught and wholly untrained mind, yet he hit by accident upon some curious and striking things. For instance. The time was the early part of 1856--fourteen or fifteen years before Mr. Darwin's Descent of Man startled the world--yet here was Macfarlane talking the same idea to me, there in the boarding house in Cincinnati.
The same general idea, but with difference. Macfarlane considered that the animal life in the world was developed in the course of aeons of time from a few microscopic²⁰ seed germs, or perhaps one microscopic seed germ deposited upon the globe by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that this development was progressive upon an ascending²¹ scale toward ultimate perfection until man was reached; and that then the progressive scheme broke pitifully down and went to wreck²³ and ruin!
He said that man's heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice²⁴, envy, vindictiveness²⁵, revengefulness, hatred²⁶, selfishness, the only animal that loved drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy²⁷ habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully²² developed the base instinct called patriotism²⁸, the sole animal that robs, persecutes²⁹, oppresses, and kills members of his own immediate³⁰ tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe. He claimed that man's intellect was a brutal³¹ addition to him and degraded him to a rank far below the plane of the other animals, and that there was never a man who did not use his intellect daily all his life to advantage himself at other people's expense. The divinest divine reduced his domestics to humble servitude under him by advantage of his superior intellect, and those servants in turn were above a still lower grade of people by force of brains that were still a little better than theirs.

1 bustle   

v.喧扰地忙乱，匆忙，奔忙；n.忙碌；喧闹

参考例句：

• The bustle and din gradually faded to silence as night advanced.随着夜越来越深，喧闹声逐渐沉寂。
• There is a lot of hustle and bustle in the railway station.火车站里非常拥挤。

2 frivolity   

n.轻松的乐事，兴高采烈；轻浮的举止

参考例句：

• It was just a piece of harmless frivolity. 这仅是无恶意的愚蠢行为。
• Hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell tnrough all our days. 享乐主义和轻薄浮佻会将地狱扩展到我们的整个日子之中。 来自辞典例句

3 chatter   

vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战

参考例句：

• Her continuous chatter vexes me.她的喋喋不休使我烦透了。
• I've had enough of their continual chatter.我已厌烦了他们喋喋不休的闲谈。

4 grilled   

adj. 烤的, 炙过的, 有格子的 动词grill的过去式和过去分词形式

参考例句：

• He was grilled for two hours before the police let him go. 他被严厉盘查了两个小时后，警察才放他走。
• He was grilled until he confessed. 他被严加拷问，直到他承认为止。

5 lank   

adj.瘦削的；稀疏的

参考例句：

• He rose to lank height and grasped Billy McMahan's hand.他瘦削的身躯站了起来，紧紧地握住比利·麦默恩的手。
• The old man has lank hair.那位老人头发稀疏

6 courteous   

adj.彬彬有礼的，客气的

参考例句：

• Although she often disagreed with me,she was always courteous.尽管她常常和我意见不一，但她总是很谦恭有礼。
• He was a kind and courteous man.他为人友善，而且彬彬有礼。

7 diligent   

adj.勤勉的，勤奋的

参考例句：

• He is the more diligent of the two boys.他是这两个男孩中较用功的一个。
• She is diligent and keeps herself busy all the time.她真勤快，一会儿也不闲着。

8 mere   

adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过

参考例句：

• That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
• It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。

9 placidly   

adv.平稳地，平静地

参考例句：

• Hurstwood stood placidly by, while the car rolled back into the yard. 当车子开回场地时，赫斯渥沉着地站在一边。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹
• The water chestnut floated placidly there, where it would grow. 那棵菱角就又安安稳稳浮在水面上生长去了。 来自汉英文学 - 中国现代小说

10 schooling   

n.教育；正规学校教育

参考例句：

• A child's access to schooling varies greatly from area to area.孩子获得学校教育的机会因地区不同而大相径庭。
• Backward children need a special kind of schooling.天赋差的孩子需要特殊的教育。

11 widower   

n.鳏夫

参考例句：

• George was a widower with six young children.乔治是个带著六个小孩子的鳏夫。
• Having been a widower for many years,he finally decided to marry again.丧偶多年后，他终于决定二婚了。

12 humble   

adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低

参考例句：

• In my humble opinion,he will win the election.依我拙见，他将在选举中获胜。
• Defeat and failure make people humble.挫折与失败会使人谦卑。

13 vocation   

n.职业，行业

参考例句：

• She struggled for years to find her true vocation.她多年来苦苦寻找真正适合自己的职业。
• She felt it was her vocation to minister to the sick.她觉得照料病人是她的天职。

14 metaphors   

隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• I can only represent it to you by metaphors. 我只能用隐喻来向你描述它。
• Thus, She's an angel and He's a lion in battle are metaphors. 因此她是天使，他是雄狮都是比喻说法。

15 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

16 remarkable   

adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的

参考例句：

• She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
• These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。

17 frankly   

adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说

参考例句：

• To speak frankly, I don't like the idea at all.老实说，我一点也不赞成这个主意。
• Frankly speaking, I'm not opposed to reform.坦率地说，我不反对改革。

18 accomplishment   

n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能

参考例句：

• The series of paintings is quite an accomplishment.这一系列的绘画真是了不起的成就。
• Money will be crucial to the accomplishment of our objectives.要实现我们的目标，钱是至关重要的。

19 promptly   

adv.及时地，敏捷地

参考例句：

• He paid the money back promptly.他立即还了钱。
• She promptly seized the opportunity his absence gave her.她立即抓住了因他不在场给她创造的机会。

20 microscopic   

adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的

参考例句：

• It's impossible to read his microscopic handwriting.不可能看清他那极小的书写字迹。
• A plant's lungs are the microscopic pores in its leaves.植物的肺就是其叶片上微细的气孔。

21 ascending   

adj.上升的，向上的

参考例句：

• Now draw or trace ten dinosaurs in ascending order of size.现在按照体型由小到大的顺序画出或是临摹出10只恐龙。

22 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

23 wreck   

n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难

参考例句：

• Weather may have been a factor in the wreck.天气可能是造成这次失事的原因之一。
• No one can wreck the friendship between us.没有人能够破坏我们之间的友谊。

24 malice   

n.恶意，怨恨，蓄意；[律]预谋

参考例句：

• I detected a suggestion of malice in his remarks.我觉察出他说的话略带恶意。
• There was a strong current of malice in many of his portraits.他的许多肖像画中都透着一股强烈的怨恨。

25 vindictiveness   

恶毒；怀恨在心

参考例句：

• I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. 当我发现这样一个温柔可爱的女性报复心居然这么重时，我感到很丧气。 来自辞典例句
• Contradictory attriButes of unjust justice and loving vindictiveness. 不公正的正义和报复的相矛盾的特点。 来自互联网

26 hatred   

n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨

参考例句：

• He looked at me with hatred in his eyes.他以憎恨的眼光望着我。
• The old man was seized with burning hatred for the fascists.老人对法西斯主义者充满了仇恨。

27 filthy   

adj.卑劣的；恶劣的，肮脏的

参考例句：

• The whole river has been fouled up with filthy waste from factories.整条河都被工厂的污秽废物污染了。
• You really should throw out that filthy old sofa and get a new one.你真的应该扔掉那张肮脏的旧沙发，然后再去买张新的。

28 patriotism   

n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义

参考例句：

• His new book is a demonstration of his patriotism.他写的新书是他的爱国精神的证明。
• They obtained money under the false pretenses of patriotism.他们以虚伪的爱国主义为借口获得金钱。

29 persecutes   

（尤指宗教或政治信仰的）迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的第三人称单数 )； 烦扰，困扰或骚扰某人

参考例句：

30 immediate   

adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的

参考例句：

• His immediate neighbours felt it their duty to call.他的近邻认为他们有责任去拜访。
• We declared ourselves for the immediate convocation of the meeting.我们主张立即召开这个会议。

31 brutal   

adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的

参考例句：

• She has to face the brutal reality.她不得不去面对冷酷的现实。
• They're brutal people behind their civilised veneer.他们表面上温文有礼，骨子里却是野蛮残忍。