These mean no matter how good, no matter what remains, etc.

Exercise.

Pick out the adverbial clauses in the following sentences; tell what kind each is, and what it modifies:—­

1.  As I was clearing away the weeds from this epitaph, the little sexton drew me on one side with a mysterious air, and informed me in a low voice that once upon a time, on a dark wintry night, when the wind was unruly, howling and whistling, banging about doors and windows, and twirling weathercocks, so that the living were frightened out of their beds, and even the dead could not sleep quietly in their graves, the ghost of honest Preston was attracted by the well-known call of “waiter,” and made its sudden appearance just as the parish clerk was singing a stave from the “mirrie garland of Captain Death.”

2.  If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble because they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas.

3.  The spell of life went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied.

ANALYZING COMPLEX SENTENCES.

379.  These suggestions will be found helpful:—­

(1) See that the sentence and all its parts are placed in the natural order of subject, predicate, object, and modifiers.

(2) First take the sentence as a whole; find the principal subject and principal predicate; then treat noun clauses as nouns, adjective clauses as adjectives modifying certain words, and adverb clauses as single modifying adverbs.

(3) Analyze each clause as a simple sentence.  For example, in the sentence, “Cannot we conceive that Odin was a reality?” we is the principal subject; cannot conceive is the principal predicate; its object is that Odin was a reality, of which clause Odin is the subject, etc.

380.  It is sometimes of great advantage to map out a sentence after analyzing it, so as to picture the parts and their relations.  To take a sentence:—­

“I cannot help thinking that the fault is in themselves, and that if the church and the cataract were in the habit of giving away their thoughts with that rash generosity which characterizes tourists, they might perhaps say of their visitors, ’Well, if you are those men of whom we have heard so much, we are a little disappointed, to tell the truth.’”

This may be represented as follows:—­

I cannot help thinking
____________________
|
_______________________|
|
| (a) THAT THE FAULT IS IN THEMSELVES, AND
|
| (b) [THAT] THEY MIGHT (PERHAPS) SAY OF THEIR VISITORS
|                        ___________________