Magical coat英语短文阅读

下面是本站小编整理的英语美文：Magical coat，希望对大家有帮助。

My l4-year-old son, John, and I spotted the coat simultaneously. It was hanging on a rack ata secondhand clothing store in Northampton Mass, crammed in with shoddy trench coats andan assortment of sad, woolen overcoats -- a rose aMong thorns.

While the other coats drooped, this one looked as if it were holding itself up. The thick, blackwool of the double-breasted chesterfield was soft and unworn, as though it had beenpreserved in mothballs for years in dead old Uncle Henry's steamer trunk. The coat had ablack velvet collar, beautiful tailoring, a Fifth Avenue label and an unbelievable price of $28. Welooked at each other, saying nothing, but John's eyes gleamed. Dark, woolen topcoats werepopular just then with teenage boys, but could cost several hundred dollars new. This coatwas even better, bearing that touch of classic elegance from a bygone era.

John slid his arms down into the heavy satin lining of the sleeves and buttoned the coat. Heturned from side to side, eyeing himself in the mirror with a serious, studied expression thatsoon changed into a smile. The fit was perfect.

John wore the coat to school the next day and came home wearing a big grin. "Ho. did the kidslike your coat?" I asked. "They loved it," he said, carefully folding it over the back of a chair andsmoothing it flat. I started calling him "Lord Chesterfield" and "The Great Gatsby."

Over the next few weeks, a change came over John. Agreement replaced contrariness, quiet,reasoned discussion replaced argument. He became more judicious, more mannerly, morethoughtful, eager to please. "Good dinner, Mom," he would say every evening.

He would generously loan his younger brother his tapes and lecture him on the niceties ofbehaviour; without a word of objection, he would carry in wood for the stove. One day when Isuggested that he might start on homework before dinner, John -- a veteran procrastinator -said, "You're right. I guess I will."

When I mentioned this incident to one of his teachers and remarked that I didn't know whatcaused the changes, she said laughing. "It must be his coat!" Another teacher told him she wasgiving him a good mark not only because he had earned it but because she liked his coat. At thelibrary, we ran into a friend who had not seen our children in a long time, "Could this be John?"he asked, looking up to John's new height, assessing the cut of his coat and extending hishand, one gentleman to another.

John and I both know we should never mistake a person's clothes for the real person withinthem. But there is something to be said for wearing a standard of excellence for the world tosee, for practising standards of excellence in though, speech, and behaviour, and for matchingwhat is on the inside to what is on the outside.

Sometimes, watching John leave for school, I've remembered with a keen sting what it felt liketo be in the eighth grade -- a time when it was as easy to try on different approaches to life asit was to try on a coat. The whole world, the whole future is stretched out ahead, a vastpanorama where all the doors are open. And if I were there right now, I would picture myselfwalking through those doors wearing my wonderful, magical coat.