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Sears Wolf Web Example

Barbara Petrie 7 Clover climbed on top of a sack of chaff—it was firm enough. She peered through the knot in the wall. The view was excellent: the roof of the sod house rose directly opposite across the gravel road. She waited. ‘That’s them!—The Poms!’ Her voice jabbed the air just as she was about to hop off the sack and shake her cramped-up leg. A black car had come into view. Now it pulled up outside the front gate. Two men got out and a woman and three girls. One girl was about Clover’s age, one was younger, and the third was older and much taller by far. Everyone raised a hand and cheered. Then the men collected the luggage from the boot and the woman and girls followed them into the house. After a time they all came outside to wave the driver off. But the girl who was tallest by far stood alone on the path after the rest of the family had gone back inside. ‘She looks like Snow White!’ Clover said aloud. ‘I wonder if she is good and clever as well as beautiful?’ Good and clever and beautiful were important words. It would be perfect to be all of those things. Still the tall Randal girl stood on the path over the road; she looked about, turning her head this way and that—to the flower beds, the shrubs, the macrocarpa trees, the sky with its blue-white wrap of nor’west arch. Then suddenly the door of the house burst open and the man came out and strode down the path and stood beside her. They chatted together. Abruptly then the girl darted away, picked a flower and ran back and gave it to the man. He said something in her ear and taking her hand, led her back along the path, let go his hand, and followed her inside. Clover stared after them. The girl was too tall to be a child and she wasn’t young enough to be led by the hand, but perhaps that’s what Pommies did, Clover mused. Now she moved from the spy-hole to the far wall of the loft where a large square-shape had been cut away to form an opening—for ventilation purposes and for dispatching empty sacks into the barn. It was just high enough to frame her upright body. Standing in the space gave Clover a kind of serenity. It was like being on a stage in a silent hall. She looked out across the barn’s expanse. The only source of light was a crude wire netting window facing the farmyard. As she stood, Clover thought again of the English immigrants: why would that family

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