An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge

Vocabulary:
1. swift: moving or capable of moving with great speed or velocity; fleet; rapid
2. stout: bulky in figure; heavily built; corpulent; thickset
3. stockade: Fortification. a defensive barrier consisting of strong posts or timbers fixed upright in the ground
4. protruded: to thrust forward; cause to project
5. spanned: to extend over or across (a section of land, a river, etc.)
6. unsteadfast:
7. sluggish: moving slowly, or having little motion, as a stream
8. gray-clad:
9. picket: a post, stake, pale, or peg that is used in a fence or barrier, to fasten down a tent, etc.
10. famished: extremely hungry

Story:
was written in 1892.

When?
Civil War, 1860s
Where?
Alabama

Peyton Farquhar:
slave owner
spy: dressed in gray, but he was a blue soldier
driftwood: bridge

Ambrose Bierce:
* he was born in 1862 in Ohio.
* was a major in the union army (blue army)
* married after the war
* did not care for religion
* got a job writing for a newspaper after the war (harsh critic) (made several ennemies: Oscar Wilde)
* no one knows what happened to him near the end of his life; he disapeared. (Mexico...)

* influences on him:

• his uncle was a general: influenced him to be in the army
• his father: had a library, so he grew to like reading
• he decided to write because he could not fight in the war any longer, which is why his stories treat the subject of war.

Images in the story:
ex. "Sound of the watch was like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil.

1. "He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble."
2. "They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; " (the sounds)
   
3. " The wind made in their branches the music of Aeolian harps."
4. " his brain was on fire;"
5. " The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective."