tailieunhanh - LUYỆN ĐỌC TIẾNG ANH QUA TÁC PHẨM VĂN HỌC-SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY- The Rubber Plant's Story

SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY The Rubber Plant's Story Đây là một serries truyện ngắn anh ngữ nổi tiếng với những từ vựng quen thuộc. Nhằm giúp các em và các bạn yêu thich tiếng anh luyện tập và củng cố thêm kỹ năng đọc tiếng anh | SHORT STORY BY O HENRY The Rubber Plant s Story We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue theatre. I haven t looked up our family tree but I believe we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d hote stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door. We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of Home Sweet Home. We aren t as green as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the front window of a 40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day and back into the flat at night and see whether you get wise or not--hey Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden--say suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve- -but I was going to tell you a story. The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to a member of the pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window and was generally watered with seltzer and lemon. I had plenty of fun in those days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the automobiles in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time. Well then the angel that .