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From our wonderful guest quiz-setters Betsey and Geoffrey Parker: one from a work for children.
1. Once upon a time a coach, containing some Englishmen and some Frenchmen, was driving over the Alps. The horses ran away, and as they were dashing across a bridge the coach caught on the stonework, tottered, and nearly fell into the ravine below. The Frenchmen were frantic with terror: they screamed and gesticulated and flung themselves about, as Frenchmen would. The Englishmen sat quite calm. An hour later the coach drew up at an inn to change horses, and by that time the situations were exactly reversed. The Frenchmen had forgotten all about the danger, and were chattering gaily; the Englishmen had just begun to feel it, and one had a nervous breakdown and was obliged to go to bed.
2. Then he dropped in two at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first;and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one.
3. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson's at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn't never seen the river so high, and it's not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn't never seen nor heard of it being so in the memory of man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He don't take some curious ways to show it, seems like. But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.
4. A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners - two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.
5. No, he did not worry about Anselmo and the problem of the bridge was no more difficult than many other problems. He knew how to blow any sort of bridge that you could name and he had blown them of all sizes and constructions. There was enough explosive and all equipment in the two packs to blow this bridge properly even if it were twice as big as Anselmo reported it...
ANSWERS TO LAST MONTH'S QUIZ - LITERARY RAIN: 1. The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot 2. The Power and the Glory (1940) - Graham Greene 3. A House for Mr Biswas (1961) - V S Naipaul 4. Bleak House (1853) - Charles Dickens 5. My Family and Other Animals (1956) - Gerald Durrell
Find the quiz here
More literary quizzes welcome - with answers please! Email to bookcase@btinternet.com