31 pages 1 hour read

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Wives of the Dead

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1832

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VocabularyIndex of Terms

How to use

This section presents terms and phrases that are central to understanding the text and may present a challenge to the reader. Use this list to create a vocabulary quiz or worksheet, to prepare flashcards for a standardized test, or to inspire classroom word games and other group activities.

Vocabulary List

1. Bay Province (proper noun):

In 18th-century America, the colonies of eastern Massachusetts, Plymouth, Maine, and parts of Nova Scotia

 

“The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened some degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of the Bay Province.” (Page 3)

 

2. comely (adjective):

attractive, beautiful

 

“Two young and comely women sat together by the fireside, nursing their mutual and peculiar sorrows.” (Page 3)

 

3. Canadian warfare (adjective phrase):

in Colonial America between the late 1600s and 1763, a series of armed conflicts between French and British colonists and allied natives that concluded with the French and Indian War

 

“They were the recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman, and two successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic.” (Pages 3 - 4)

 

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