My summer holiday began on July 5th. I didn't want to stay at home and did nothing in the hot summer. I called my grandma, and she asked me to go to her village. I was very happy with it. After four hours, I got to my grandma's house by bus. There are many trees around her house. I liked to play games with other children during the day. At night, people in the neighborhood often came and sat together to chat. My grandma liked telling stories. My new friends and I enjoyed her stories very much.

    There is a pool in the village. My friends and I often went there with some food and caught fish in the pool. Then we cooked the fish and had dinner there. It was not easy to catch fish, but it was interesting and exciting. I stayed there for about a month, and then I went back home.

B

    Mr. Brown has got a dog. Its name is Ben. And the dog is very good to Mr. Brown.

    One hot day, Mr. Brown returned home from work and said to himself, "I want to know where the water jar (罐子) is." Then he found the water jar with clean water. Mr. Brown wanted to drink some water. But the dog barked (吠叫).

    "Oh, Ben! Please be quiet! I will give you some water," said Mr. Brown. But the dog didn't stop barking and even jumped up to him. "What? Let me drink some water first. Then I will give you something to eat," said Mr. Brown. But the dog still didn't stop barking. And the dog still jumped up and even broke the jar at last. Mr. Brown got very angry (生气的). But soon, he found a snake (蛇) in the pieces of the jar. He knew about the snake. It was poisonous. It could be very dangerous for him if he drank the water. Mr. Brown thanked the dog a lot.

    I live in Mentone, a quiet, simple, restful place, where the rich never come. I met Theophile Magnan, a retired, rich, old man from Lyons yesterday. In the Hotel des Anglais. Theophile looked sad and dreamy, and didn't talk with anybody else. Which brought me back to the past.

A long time ago, Francois Millet. Claude, Carl and I were young artists — very young artists — in fact.

    Yes, Francois Millet. The great French artist, was my friend.

Millet wasn't any greater than we were at that time. He didn't have any fame, even in his own village.

    We were all poor though we had stacks and stacks of as good pictures as anybody in Europe painted. Once a person ever offered four francs for Millet's "Angelus", which he intended to sell for eight.

    It was a fact in human history that a great artist would never be acknowledged* until after he was starved and dead. His pictures climbed to high prices after his death.

    Then we made a decision that one of us must die, to save the others and himself.

    Millet was elected to die.

    During the next three months Millet painted with all his might, enlarged his stock all he could, not pictures, not sketches, studies, parts of studies, fragments of studies, of course, with his cipher *  on them.

    They were the things to be sold.

    Carl went to Paris to start the work of building up Millet's name. Claude and I went to sell Millet's small pictures and to build up his name as well.

    We made Millet a master. I always said to my customer, "I am a fool to sell a picture of Francois Millet's at all, for he is not going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures can't be had for love or money."

    Claude and I took care to spread that little fact as far as we could.

Carl made friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.

    The sad end came at last, Millet died, not really.  He became Theophile Magnan.

    The pictures went up. There's a man in Paris today who owns seventy Millet pictures. He paid us two million francs for them. Do you still remember the "Angelus"? Carl sold it for twenty—two hundred francs. And as for the bushels of sketches and studies which Millet produced in the last six weeks, well, it would astonish you to know the figure we sell them at nowadays.

    We are no longer artists and Millet dead.

    A jobless man wanted very much to have the position of "office boy" at Microsoft. The HR manager interviewed him and then watched him cleaning the floor as a test. "You have passed the test," he said. "Give me your e-mail address and I'll send you the form to fill in and the date when you may start." The man answered, "But I don't have a computer, neither an e-mail." "I'm sorry," said the HR manager. "If you don't have an e-mail, that means you are not living. And anyone who isn't living cannot have the job."

    The man left with no hope at all. He didn't know what to do, with only 10 dollars in his pocket. He thought and thought. Then he went to the supermarket and bought 10 kilos of tomatoes. He sold the tomatoes from door to door. In less than two hours, he had 20 dollars. He repeated the operation three times, and returned home with 60 dollars. The man came to know that he could make money in this way, and started to go early every day, and returned home late. Shortly, he bought a cart, then a truck, then he had his own fleet of delivery vehicles (运货车队). Five years later, the man was one of the biggest food retailers (零售商) in the US.

    One day, one of his friends asked him for his e-mail. He said, "I haven't got one." His friend couldn't believe his ears. "Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an e-mail?" The man thought for a while and answered, "Yes, I'd be an office boy at Microsoft!"