现代大学英语 精读5 L11 AN IOWA CHRISTMAS 课文.docVIP

Lesson 11 AN IOWA CHRISTMAS By PAUL ENGLEILLUSTATED FOR AMERICAN HERITAGE BY DOUGLAS GORSLINE Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches. My bells were on my father’s team of horses as he drove up to our horse-headed hitching post with the bobsled that would take us to celebrate Christmas on the family farm ten miles out in the country. My father would bring the team down Fifth Avenue at a smart trot, (licking his whip over the horses’ rumps and making the bells double their light, thin jangling over the snow, whose radiance threw back a brilliance like the sound of bells. There are no such departures any more: the whole family piling into the bobsled with a foot of golden oat straw to lie in and heavy bullalo robes to lie under, the horses stamping the soft snow, and at every motion of their hoofs the bells jingling, jingling. My father sat there with the reins firmly held, wearing a long coat made from the hide of a favorite family horse, the deep chestnut color still glowing, his mittens also from ihe same hide. It always troubled me as a boy of eight that the horses had so indiderent a view of their late friend appearing as a warm overcoat on the back of the man who put the iron bit in their mouths. There are no streets like those any more: the snow sensibly left on the road for the sake of sleighs and easy travel. We could hop oil and ride the heavy runners as they made their hissing, tearing sound over the packed snow. And along the streets we met other horses, so that we moved from one set of bells to another, from the tiny tinkle of the individual bells on the shafts to the silvery, leaping sound of the long strands hung over the harness. There would be an occasional brass-mounted automobile laboring on its narrow tires and as often as not pulled up the slippery hills by a horse, and we