III. Have you read any short stories by the author? Tell one of them

II. How do you know that it is a passage from a detective story?

I. What helps you guess the author of the passage? What is the author's name?

IV. Do you remember any other episodes from the book? Retell one of them.

III. What do you think of the man who did scrambled eggs?

II. Write a few disjunctive questions based on the passage and ask your comrades to respond to them.

I. What book is the passage taken from?

IV

On the following day he spent some hours with a theatrical agent of his acquaintance. In the afternoon he went to Oxford. On the day. after he drove down to the country, - it was late when he returned.

He had telephoned before he left to make an appointment with Mr. Alistair Blunt for that same evening.

it was half past nine when he reached the Gothic House.

Alistair Blunt was alone in the library when Poirot was shown.in.

He looked an eager question at his visitor as he shook hands,

He said:

"Well?"

Slowly, Poirot nodded his head.

Blunt looked at him in most incredulous appreciation.

"Have you found her?"

"Yes. Yes, I have found her."

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

V

At eighteen I knew French, German, and some Italian, but Г was extremely uneducated and I was deeply conscious of my ignorance. I read everything that came my way. I suppose it gained me a certain amount of general knowledge which is useful for the novelist to have. One never knows when an out of the way bit of information will come in handy. I made lists of what I read and one of these lists by some accident I still have. It is my reading for two months and, but that I made it only for myself, I could not believe that it was veracious. It shows that I read three of Shakespeare's plays, two volumes of Mommsen’s.

History of Rome, a large part of Lanson's Liiteralure Francaise, two or three novels, some of the French classics, a couple of-scientific works, and a play of Ibsen's. I was indeed the industrious apprentice. During the time I was at St Thomas's Hospital I went systematically through English, French, Italian, and Latin literature. I read a lot of history, a little philosophy, and a good deal of science. My curiosity was too great to allow me to give much time to reflect upon what I read; I could hardly wait to finish one book, so eager was I to begin another. This was always an adventure, and I would start upon a famous work as excitedly as a reasonable young man would go in to bat for his side or a nice girl go to a dance. Now and then journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe's Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood racing through my veins. To me reading is a rest as to oth'er people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than that; it is a necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug. I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all.

And yet, though I have read so much, I am a bad reader. 1 read slowly and I am a poor skipper. I find it difficult to leave a book, however bad and however much it bores me, unfinished. I could count on my fingers the number of books that I have not read from cover to cover. On the other hand there are few books that I have read twice. I know very well that there are many of which I cannot get the full value on a single reading, but in that they have given me all I was capable of getting at the time, and this, though I may forget their details, remains a permanent enrichment. I know people who read the same book over and over again. It can only be that they read with their eyes and not with their sensibility. It is a mechanical exercise like the Tibetan's turning of a pray ing-wheel. It is doubtless a harmless occupation, but they are wrong if they think it an intelligent one.

(From "The Summing Up" by S. Maugham)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

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