Exercises

1. Our beagle loves to hunt. If someone opens the back door for her, she barrels down porch steps into the yard. Then she runs back and forth across the lawn in ecstasy, and her nose cruises the wet grass for smells. These are smells of cats, rabbits, and other presences too subtle for human detection. She sniffs and spins her tail in quick circles which spins clockwise first and then  counterclockwise. These two activities always occur together. They are sniffing and spinning which seem to propel her along.

2. The Government Printing Office in Washington D.C., is a source of much useful information, but few people know about it. It is the official publishing house for the federal government, so the GPO publishes pamphlets and books on a vast number of subjects. These subjects range from the dangers of X-rays from home TV sets to the identification of mushrooms. About 27,000 publications are offered through the Superintendent of Documents, because many of them are inexpensive. However, there is no charge at all for some of them.
 
3. A man who was John Jacob Astor reaped America's first fortune. He was a German immigrant and he made his initial money trading Indian furs. He was lowborn, uneducated, and he never learned to speak English properly. He carried on his business to the end in an accent, which was redolent of the Hamburg gutters.