| Directions: Complete the-passage by choosing the proper words or phrases in the box Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need. | |
I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely. I had the 1______ child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with 2______ persons, and I think from the very start my literary 3______ was mixed up with the feeling of being 4______. I knew that I had a natural ability with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that it 5______ a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. However, the quantity of serious writing which I 6______ all through my childhood would not add up to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, with my mother 7______ it down on a piece of paper. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had "chair-like teeth"-a good enough expression. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a poe which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished "nature poems." I also, about twice, 8______ a short story which was a 9______. That was the total of the would-be serious work that actually set down on paper during all those years. |