Read through the passage printed below and then answer the questions which follow
it, using as far as possible your own words:—
An Important Burden
It was the first of January, 1900: New Year’s Day; New Century’s Day. But that
portentous fact was of no interest to two little boys walking with extreme care and
anxiety across Battersea Bridge at half-past three in the afternoon.
Their concern was immediate, for the elder brother, a small fellow of eleven, with
a large nose, brown eyes, and a sallow skin that gave him a Spanish cast, was carrying
an aquarium. This task so occupied him that his follower, the brother who shadowed
his life, and for whom he usually felt solemnly responsible, was for the moment
forgotten.
This did not disturb the junior, for he too was as anxious, and as signally concen¬
trated, as his brother. Though only seven years old, he carried the burden of life with
gravity. His nose was smaller than his brother’s, and it was somewhat pinched, the
nostrils white and enlarged. This made the red cheeks all the more noticeable: and
it may have added to the fiery light of his eyes, which were also brown. Rather short
pf breath, from excitement and not from haste, he trotted along close to his brother,
from time to time putting out a worried hand and grasping the elder’s coat-tail, only
to be shrugged off with a muttered exclamation of “ Stop it! You’ll make me
drop it! ”
He appeared to understand this abruptness, for his brother, always sardonic even
in affection, was inclined to be sharply irritable in moments of stress.
And how tense, how critical, was this particular moment! It marked a stage, a
peak-point, in their lives. Both had longed, through childhood’s infinity of time,
for a goldfish. Their father, however, was so boyishly concerned with his own
enthusiasms that he had ignored this longing. Their mother was by experience and
temperament so generally apprehensive that she hesitated before committing herself,
or her children, to the caring for livestock. There was already a cat in the house, and
she had made this excuse for banning the buying of a goldfish., She said that the cat
would hook it out of the bowl and eat it, thus adding to the general redness and
toothiness of nature, under whose menace she was convinced that her two boys
were doomed to fulfil their fragile destinies.
Richard Church
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