*A DAY'S WAIT*

'A Day's Wait' by Ernest Hemingway,an American writer,deals with a boy whose misunderstanding leads him to a miserable condition.

Ernest Hemingway is very famous American novelist  He was born a in Illinois, America in 1899. He began to earn his own living at the age of sixteen working in various capacities. He served in the army during the First World War. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature for his novel "The old man and the sea He died in 1961. Hemingway has a characteristic style marked by short and effective sentences. "A Day's wait" is a story where a boy is ill, thinks he will die and prepares himself to die. It is all because he has a wrong idea about thermometers

Schatz was a boy of nine years old. One day, when he entered the room of his father, his father observed that he looked ill. But the Schatz said he was all right. However his father brought the doctor. When the doctor came, he took the Schatz's temperature with a thermometer. Thermometer was a new concept in that area and many had many ideas about it. The young boy was also having strange ideas about the thermometer After assessing the temperature the doctor said that it was one hundred and two. He left three different medicines. He said it was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger. Schatz's father looked after him very carefully. He gave him the medicine regularly and read aloud some interesting books. After sometime the father left Schatz alone hoping that he would sleep well with the help of the medicine.

It was a bright cold day. The ground was covered with snow. All the bare trees and bushes appeared as if they are painted ice. The father with started out with a gun and his dog. Both the dog the master went on the and road. When they tried to walk on the frozen river it slipped both down and fell However he managed to get up. He shook the bushes and frightened the birds. The birds flew up. He tired to shoot some. But it was difficult because of snow Anyhow he killed two and came home with the hunted birds.

After his return, the father asked Schatz to swallow some capsules. The boy asked if it would do any good to improve his health. The father was surprised at this question. The boy's next question surprised him more. For, the boy asked at what time he would die. The father could not answer him immediately and was shocked to hear such strange words from his son's mouth. But he guessed that something should have happened that the boy is frightened. On further talking, the father found out that the boy thought that he would die because his temperature was one hundred and two. The boy said that he had heard in the school, from his classmates, telling that nobody would live with forty four degrees. And the boy told him that as he was having 102 he would definitely die.

The father understood the whole thing and laughed at the boy loudly to dispel his fear. He then explained to him how the Fahrenheit thermometer and the centigrade thermometer differed like kilometers and miles. The boy realized his mistake and all his fear was due to his misunderstanding of the facts on thermometer. This story tells us that we should clarify anything before come to a conclusion.