Sentence No. 138 · 12 August 2026
The old German hurried away to the bookshelf, and took from behind the books a small bottle, half of whose contents he poured into a cup.
Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm
Olive Schreiner — The Story of an African Farm (1883) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice the two verbs joined by 'and' — 'hurried' and 'took' — each carrying its own prepositional phrase ('to the bookshelf', 'from behind the books'). The relative pronoun 'whose' then hooks the final clause to 'bottle', so that fragment must trail the noun it modifies.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A servant offers small kindnesses to a stranger who has just had a fright. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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