the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney.  The many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third, threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms.  Carved globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories.  Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks.  On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright.  All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth, on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among men’s daily interests.

EXERCISES

A. Select the sentence or part of a sentence which gives the fundamental image in each of the following selections:—­

1.  It was a big, smooth-stone-faced house, product of the ’Seventies, frowning under an outrageously insistent Mansard, capped by a cupola, and staring out of long windows overtopped with “ornamental” slabs.  Two cast-iron deer, painted death-gray, twins of the same mold, stood on opposite sides of the front walk, their backs toward it and each other, their bodies in profile to the street, their necks bent, however, so that they gazed upon the passer-by—­yet gazed without emotion.  Two large, calm dogs guarded the top of the steps leading to the front door; they also were twins and of the same interesting metal, though honored beyond the deer by coats of black paint and shellac.

—­Booth Tarkington:  The Conquest of Canaan ("Harper’s").

2.  At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly personage, in an old-fashioned dressing gown of faded damask, and wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length.  It quite overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared vaguely about the room.  After a very brief inspection of his face, it was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one as that which, slowly, and with as indefinite an aim as a child’s first journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward.  Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait.  It was the spirit of a man that could not walk.  The expression of his countenance—­while, notwithstanding, it had the light of reason in it—­ seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away, and feebly to recover itself again.  It was like a flame which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly upward—­more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once extinguished.