He's an old cobbler（修鞋匠）with a shop in the Marais,a historic area in Paris.When I took him my shoes,he at first told me: “I haven't time.Take them to the other fellow on the main street ; he'll fix them for you right away.”

    But I'd had my eye on his shop for a long time.Just looking at his bench loaded with tools and pieces of leather,I knew he was a skilled craftsman（手艺人）.“No,” I replied,“the other fellow can't do it well.”

     “The other fellow” was one of those shopkeepers who fix shoes and make keys “while-U-wait”-without knowing much about mending shoes or making keys.They work carelessly,and when they have finished sewing back a sandal strap（鞋带）you might as well just throw away the pair.

    The man saw I wouldn't give in,and he smiled.He wiped his hands on his blue apron（围裙）,looked at my shoes, had me write my name on one shoe with a piece of chalk and said,“Come back in a week.”

    I was about to leave when he took a pair of soft leather boots off a shelf.

     “See what I can do?” he said with pride.“Only three of us in Paris can do this kind of work…”

    When I got back out into the street,the world seemed brand-new to me.He was something out of an ancient legend,this old craftsman with his way of speaking familiarly,his very strange,dusty felt hat,his funny accent from who-knows-where and,above all,his pride in his craft.

    There are times when nothing is important but the bottom line,when you can do things any old way as long as it “pays”,when,in short,people look on work as a path to ever-increasing consumption（消费）rather than a way to realize their own abilities.In such a period it is a rare comfort to find a cobbler who gets his greatest satisfaction from pride in a job well done.

    You might think that “global warming” means nothing more than a rise in the world's temperature. But, rising sea levels caused by it have resulted in the first evacuation (撤离) of an island nation — the citizens of Tuvalu will have to leave their homeland.

    During the 20th century, sea level has risen 8～12 inches. As a result, Tuvalu has experienced lowland flooding of salt water which has polluted the country's drinking water.

    Paani Laupepa, a Tuvaluan government official, reported to the Earth Policy Institute that the nation suffered an unusually high number of fierce storms in the past ten years. Many scientists connect higher surface water temperatures resulting from global warming to greater and more damaging storms.

    Laupepa expressed dissatisfaction with the United States for refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement calling for industrialized nations to reduce their green house gas emissions (排放), which are a main cause of global warming.“By refusing to sign the agreement, the US has effectively taken away the freedom of future generations of Tuvaluans to live where their forefathers have lived for thousands of years,” Laupepa told the BBC.

    Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand to allow the gradual move of its people to both countries.

    Tuvalu is not the only country that is vulnerable (易受影响的) to rising sea levels. Maumoon Gayoon, president of the Maldives, told the United Nations that global warming has made his country of 311 000 an“endangered nation”.

    One day, Mr. Smith went to a dinner party. He was wearing very old clothes. He came into the room.But people in the room didn't look at him. They didn't ask him to sit at the table. He wasn't happy. But he said nothing.Mr. Smith went home quickly and put on his best clothes. He went back to the party. Everyone in the room stood up and looked at him. They gave him good food to eat.Mr. Smith took off his coat, and put it on the food and said, "Eat, coat!" The other people were surprised and asked, "What are you doing? Why do you do that?" Mr. Smith answered, "I am asking my coat to eat food. When I wore old clothes, you didn't look at me. You didn't ask me to sit down. Now I am wearing these nice clothes. And you give me good food. Now I see, you give the food to my coat, not to me."

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    Last Sunday, my whole family went to the amusement park near our hometown. As we planned the day before, on my brother's 13th birthday. David was two years older than I.

The weather was perfect and everyone was happy. The park was not too crowded. "Fioda," said my brother, "do you want to go on that ride with me?" "Of course," I said. The ride was brand new. I saw commercials(广告) for this huge roller coaster(过山车） on television. I was so excited to ride it. As we got in line, we talked excitedly about what we might experience. We decided that we would both try to keep our hands in the air the whole time. We believed that would make it even more enjoyable. I was so busy talking to my brother that I missed the most important sign—-Empty your pockets before going on the ride. Something bad happened!

    The ride started. It was a really fast roller! Before I knew it, we were upside down. I felt my phone slipping（滑落） from my pocket. My hands were in the air, just as we had promised, and I didn't catch my phone in time. It hit me on the head, fell down to the ground and broke. My parents said I wouldn't have a new phone until I had enough money to pay for it. I need to be more careful. Next time, I'll pay better attention the warning signs as we wait in line for the ride.

"Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here," wrote the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle. Well, not any more it is not.

Suddenly, Britain looks to have fallen out with its favourite historical form. This could be no more than a passing literary craze, but it also points to a broader truth about how we now approach the past: less concerned with learning from forefathers and more interested in feeling their pain. Today, we want empathy, not inspiration.

From the earliest days of the Renaissance, the writing of history meant recounting the exemplary lives of great men. In 1337, Petrarch began work on his rambling writing De Viris Illustribus (On Famous Men), highlighting the virtus (or virtue) of classical heroes. Petrarch celebrated their greatness in conquering fortune and rising to the top. This was the biographical tradition which Niccolo Machiavelli turned on its head. In The Prince, he championed cunning, ruthlessness, and boldness, rather than virtue, mercy and justice, as the skills of successful leaders.

Over time, the attributes of greatness shifted. The Romantics commemorated the leading painters and authors of their day, stressing the uniqueness of the artist's personal experience rather than public glory. By contrast, the Victorian author Samual Smiles wrote Self-Help as a catalogue of the worthy lives of engineers, industrialists and explores. "The valuable examples which they furnish of the power of self-help, if patient purpose, resolute working and steadfast integrity, issuing in the formulation of truly noble and many character, exhibit," wrote Smiles. "what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself." His biographies of James Walt, Richard Arkwright and Josiah Wedgwood were held up as beacons to guide the working man through his difficult life.

This was all a bit bourgeois (庸俗的) for Thomas Carlyle, who focused his biographies on the truly heroic lives of Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate, but to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals.

Not everyone was convinced by such bombast (浮夸的描写): "The history of all existing society is the history of class struggle" wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. "It is man, real living man, who does all that." And history should be the story of the masses and their record of struggle.

This was the tradition which revolutionized our appreciation of the past. It transformed the public history: downstairs became just as fascinating as upstairs. In place of Thomas Carlyle, Britain nurtured Christopher Hill, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. Whole new realms of understanding—from gender to race to cultural studies—were opened up as scholars unpicked the diversity of lost societies.