A Northern Light
Context Clues pages 104-168
Target Goal: I can define words using context clues.
Directions: Write what you think the bold/underlined word means due to the context in the passage. Circle or
underline the context that assisted you in defining the word.
1. “’A man earned daily for 5 days 3 times as much as he paid for his board, after which he was obliged to be
idle 4 days […]Upon counting his money after paying for his board he found that he had 2 ten-dollar bills and
4 dollars…’
I thought.[…] About the man and his meager wages and shabby boardinghouse and lonely life” (Donnelly
122).
2. “Her clothes are still damp. Her hair is, too. She had left a small valise in the foyer. Someone has placed it
on the floor next to the bed” (Donnelly 137).
3. “She should be in her mother’s house, with her own things around and her family to sit up through the night
with her. I decide it’s only proper that I keep her company for a spell. I sit down in a wicker chair, wincing
as it creaks, and stare at the picture on the wall and try to think of good things about the deceased, like you do
at a wake” (Donnelly 137).
4. “By the time I got home, it was nearly six o’clock. I had been so wrapped up in my exams, and in rehashing
them with Weaver, that I’d forgotten all about my uncle” (Donnelly 145).
5. “I heard my uncle say, ‘Why you stay here squeezing cow teets all day long, Michel? Wat kine life dat for for
a reevairman? Why you not come back and drive da logs?’
Pa laughed, ‘And let four girls raise themselves? All that whiskey’s addled your brain’” (Donnelly 152).
6. “And the next thing we knew, he was clearing trees on sixty acres of land he’s bought in Eagle Bay. He built
us a house from the trees he felled—a real house, not some pokey log cabin with hemlock bark for a roof. He
had the trees milled into planks at Hess’s sawmill in Inlet, not at my grandfather’s mill or my uncle’s”
(Donnelly 154-155).
7. “’I think I’m going to get some coconut drops, too, Mattie,’ Beth said, still deliberating. ‘Or maybe some
King Leo sticks. Or Necco’s’” (Donnelly 162).
8. “Miss Wilcox meant well, I knew she did, but I also knew Pa. She’d never get him to say yes; she’d only rile
him” (Donnelly 165).