Sentence No. 81 · 16 June 2026
The sky was blue, the larks were soaring high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside more beautiful and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Charles Dickens — Great Expectations (1861) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The sentence is a comma splice chain — three independent clauses joined by commas alone, with no conjunctions. In puzzles, this means no phrase signals a new clause with "and" or "but"; watch instead for a new subject-verb pair ("The sky was," "the larks were," "I thought") to identify each clause's starting phrase.
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 traveller returns through familiar countryside, his heart softened by homecoming. 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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