"Ah well, Miss Eva, I 'spose your pa'ull come home to spile things as he allays have done. It ain't no wonder, I ses, as you sits moping by the winder, looking double your age, and you only twenty, as has no right to look forty, whatever you may say, though I took my dying alfred-david on its blessed truth." This slightly incoherent and decidedly pessimistic speech was moaned, rather than spoken, by a lean-bodied, hard-faced, staring-eyed woman to a pretty girl, who did not look at the speaker. And small wonder. Mrs. Merry--inappropriate name--was unattractive to the eye. She was angular, grey-skinned, grey-eyed, grey-haired, and had thin, drooping lips almost as grey as the rest of her. In her black stuff gown--she invariably wore the most funereal dresses--with uneasy hands folded under a coarse apron, she stood before Eva Strode, uttering lamentations worthy of Jeremiah at his worst. But such dumpishness was characteristic of the woman. She delighted in looking on the black side of things, and the blacker they were, the more she relished them. Out of wrong-doing, and grief and things awry, she extracted a queer sort of pleasure, and felt never so happy as when the worst came to the worst. It seemed unfit that such a walking pageant of woe should be called Merry. Eva, already depressed by the voice and sentiment of this lamentable dame, continued to look at the gaudy hollyhocks, even while she answered calmly, "I expect my father is the same as he was when he went to South Africa five years ago. I don't hope to find him an angel. I am certain he has not changed."

Teaching you how to make a classic plane yourself (it takes only a day or so) and how to use it in a refined manner.

An easy guide to drawing people for budding artists ages 9 to 12 Grab a pencil and an eraser—it's time to explore the world around you and illustrate the people in it! Featuring a step-by-step format for beginners, Figure Drawing for Kids is a great way to start sketching friends and family, pop culture icons, and epic superheroes—one simple exercise at a time. Project-based activities—Learn how to draw people with 13 different projects that will advance your skills from basic shapes and shading to full, detailed illustrations. Guided practice—Explore essential drawing concepts like proportion, negative space, point of view, composition, and crosshatch, and practice with a range of human sizes, shapes, skin tones, and abilities. Bonus drawing tips—Learn to draw from life or a photograph, how to set up a model station, and how to complete your drawings with additional objects and landscape elements. Dive in and let the doodling fun begin with this beginner's guide to drawing for kids.

Redolent of Chicago's ethnic culture, Susan Hahn's intensely personal lyrics emerge from the world of an extended Jewish family and its neighbors. The voices of these immigrants are imbued with the profound effects and memories of the journey "From a patrolled town in the Ukraine/to Baltimore on a boat, then a train to Chicago." Hahn's poetry is about love and the lack of love, about rejection, and about other forces—generational, political, social, and sexual—that overwhelm individuals and cause them to limit themselves both physically and psychologically.

In 1975 I went to Peking for a year, together with nine other British students who had been exchanged by the British Council for ten Chinese students. The latter knew exactly what they were doing: learning English in order to further the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We were less sure. From 1966, China had been turned upside down by young Red Guards who were encouraged to Bombard the Headquarters'. Professors, surgeons, artists, pianists, novelists and film directors were attacked for their bourgeois pursuit of excellence or their attachment to decadent Western ideas. Though by 1975 there were no longer violent street battles or badly beaten bodies floating down the Pearl River, we found Peking University governed by a Revolutionary Committee of workers, peasants and Party members determined that we should not learn too much and become experts divorced from the masses. With our Chinese classmates, we spent half our time in factories, getting in the way of workers making railway engines, or in the fields, learning from peasants how to bundle cabbage or plant rice seedlings in muddy water. Heroically, we stayed up half the night to dig rather shallow underground shelter

Discover the simple secrets to drawing amazing hands, from popular YouTube instructor Mark Crilley Whether you’re drawing superheroes, manga and anime characters, robots, highly detailed photorealistic figures or anything in between, hands can be the most challenging aspect of creating compelling characters that gesture, communicate, and truly come to life. In simple step-by-step lessons along with plenty of full-color examples, popular instructor and author Mark Crilley takes you from the basics to the finer points. All you need is paper, pencil, and eraser.

The first English-language translation of the French 18th-century classic text on woodworking.