小学英语英语故事童话故事TheOldStreetLamp老路灯.docVIP

PAGE / NUMPAGES The?Old?Street?Lamp?老路灯 Have you ever heard the story of the old street lamp? It is not really very amusing, but one can bear to hear it once, anyway. There was once a respectable old street lamp who had performed his duties faithfully and well for many years; but now had been declared to be too old-fashioned. This was the last evening that it would hang from the lamppost and illuminate the street; and he felt like a ballerina who was dancing for the last time and knew that tomorrow she would be a has-been. The lamp was very frightened of the coming day, for he had been told that he would be inspected by the six and thirty men of the town council. They were to decide whether the lamp was fit for further service and, if so, what kind. They might suggest that he be hung over one of the lesser bridges, or be sold to a factory, or condemned altogether, which meant that he would be melted down. Then he would be made into something else, of course; but what worried him was that he did not know whether he would then be able to recall that he had been a street lamp. No matter what happened to him, one thing was certain: tomorrow he would be separated from the night watchman and his wife, and that was a tragedy, for he considered them to be his family. He had been hung on his lamppost the very year that the man became a night watchman. His wife had been young and snobbish. She would look at the street lamp at night but she wouldnt so much as glance at it in daylight. During recent years, however, when all three of them--the night watchman, his wife, and the street lamp--had grown old, the wife had taken care of the lamp: polished it and filled it with oil. The old couple were an honest pair who had never cheated the lamp out of a single drop of oil. This was to be the last night that the old lamp would shine down upon the pavement. Tomorrow it would be taken to a room in the town hall. These two facts made the lamp feel so sad that he flic