EXERCISES

Analyze the following.  Discuss the suitability of various members of the class for each part.  Which details do you think least essential?

1.  He is a tall, thin, gaunt, withered, domineering man of sixty.  When excited or angry he drops into dialect, but otherwise his speech, though flat, is fairly accurate.  He sits in an arm-chair by the empty hearth working calculations in a small shiny black notebook, which he carries about with him everywhere, in a side pocket.

2.  When the curtain rises a man is seen climbing over the balcony.  His hair is close cut; his shirt dirty and blood-stained.  He is followed by another man dressed like a sailor with a blue cape, the hood drawn over his head.  Moonlight.

3.  Enter Dinah Kippen quickly, a dingy and defiant young woman carrying a tablecloth.  She is a nervous creature, driven half-mad by the burden of her cares.  Conceiving life, necessarily, as a path to be traversed at high speed, whenever she sees an obstacle in her way, whether in the physical or in the moral sphere, she rushes at it furiously to remove it or destroy it.

4.  Mrs. Rhead, a woman of nearly sixty, is sitting on the sofa, crocheting some lace, which is evidently destined to trim petticoats.  Her hair is dressed in the style of 1840, though her dress is of the 1860 period.

5.  The song draws nearer and Patricia Carleon enters.  She is dark and slight, and has a dreamy expression.  Though she is artistically dressed, her hair is a little wild.  She has a broken branch of some flowering tree in her hand.

6.  Enter a Neat-herd, followed by King Alfred, who is miserably clad and shivering from cold; he carries a bow and a few broken arrows.  A log fire is burning smokily in a corner of the hut.

7.  Enter from the right Ito, the cynic philosopher, book in hand.

8.  The rising of the curtain discovers the two Miss Wetherills—­two sweet old ladies who have grown so much alike it would be difficult for a stranger to tell the one from the other.  The hair of both is white, they are dressed much alike, both in some soft lavender colored material, mixed with soft lace.

9.  Newte is a cheerful person, attractively dressed in clothes suggestive of a successful follower of horse races.  He carries a white pot hat and tasselled cane.  His gloves are large and bright.  He is smoking an enormous cigar.

10.  She is young, slender, graceful; her yellow hair is in disorder, her face the color of ruddy gold, her teeth white as the bones of the cuttle-fish, her eyes humid and sea-green, her neck long and thin, with a necklace of shells about it; in her whole person something inexpressibly fresh and glancing, which makes one think of a creature impregnated with sea-salt dipped in the moving waters, coming out of the hiding-places of the rocks.  Her petticoat of striped white and