Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
Chosen for its rhetorical craft: in six sentences Mr. Arable surrenders to Fern's plea while refusing to admit defeat. The mock-official verb 'distribute,' the concessive turn 'to be sure, but nevertheless,' and the deadpan moral about getting out of bed promptly convert a moral capitulation into a joke about punctuality — the syntax itself performs the face-saving.
"No, I only distribute pigs to early risers," said Mr. Arable. "Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one, to be sure, but nevertheless...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then single out the one sentence you would call its hinge — the place where the morning could have gone the other way. Explain what that sentence reveals about how E.B. White wants us to read the argument between Fern and her father.
Discussion Questions
- When Fern asks whether her father would have killed her had she been born small, Mr. Arable answers, 'A little girl is one thing, a little runty pig is another' — and Fern replies that she sees no difference. Explain why a line her father finds obvious does not exist for Fern at all. Use each speaker's own words from this scene as evidence of what each of them is weighing as they look at the same runt.
- At the moment Mr. Arable gives in, a queer look comes over his face and he seems 'almost ready to cry himself' — yet his words promise only that Fern will 'see what trouble a pig can be.' Explain why White lets the father's face and his speech tell two different stories at once, and argue what the gap between them reveals about his change of mind.
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The smallest, weakest animal born in a litter. In this chapter the label works like a verdict: once the piglet falls under it, the adults speak of its death as settled farm routine — which is exactly the labeling Fern refuses to accept.
Item 2
A wrong that offends fairness itself, not merely a broken rule or a piece of bad luck. It is the largest moral word Fern knows, and she aims it at her own father; he later repeats it in a joke that half teases and half honors it.
Item 3
Coming before its right or natural time, and so carrying a sense of wrongness. Mr. Arable's choice of this adjective for the death Wilbur escaped quietly grants part of Fern's case — a death at the wrong time is not a neutral event.
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
+ 7 more questions in the complete study guide
Get the complete study guide — free
Sign up and get your first book with every chapter included. Copywork, discussion questions, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Sign up free