![]() His only advice is that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. On the bright side, Scout and Jem receive air rifles for Christmas, though Atticus refuses to teach them how to shoot. Later at home, Scout tells Uncle Jack where he went wrong: he never asked for her side of the story and punished her based on Francis’s incorrect assertion, and she begs him to keep this entire situation a secret from Atticus. While at Finch’s Landing with Francis, a boring family member who is a year older, Francis baits Scout to fight him, ensuring that she gets in trouble with her beloved Uncle Jack. Atticus pleads with Scout to not beat people up when they hurl insults at her about it, something that Scout struggles with greatly at Christmas. Scout and Jem become targets of abuse from schoolmates, neighbors, townspeople, and even some family members. That year, Atticus is appointed by the court to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a poor, notoriously vicious white man named Bob Ewell. Scout is horrified, but Atticus stifles his laughter. A few months later, in the dead of winter, the Finch's neighbor Miss Maudie Atkinson's house catches fire, and as Scout and Finch watch it burn, someone Scout doesn't see puts a blanket around her shoulders. Jem is very hurt, especially when Atticus notes that the tree doesn’t look ill. Meanwhile, Scout and Jem continue to find gifts in the knothole until Nathan Radley cements it shut, claiming that the tree is dying. When Jem goes back to Radleys’ fence to retrieve the pants later that night, he finds them mended and folded. He leaves them behind and, to cover their tracks, the children show up with the rest of the neighborhood at Nathan Radley’s gate and explain that Jem is without pants because Dill won the pants in a game of strip poker, much to the horror and exasperation of the adults. As they run away, and Jem's pants get caught in the Radley fence. He, Scout, and Jem grow more daring and sneak onto the Radley property one night to look in the window, but Nathan Radley sees them and thinks they're thieves. When they find several sticks of gum, Scout and Jem ignore the rumor that everything on the Radley property is poison. The highlights of the school year come when Scout and Jem occasionally find treasures stuffed into a knothole of a tree next to the Radleys’ fence. He suggests that she put herself in others’ shoes to understand how they see things. When she comes home from school upset, Atticus encourages her to think about how Miss Caroline must’ve felt-she had no idea how to deal with the eccentricities of Maycomb children, just as Scout had no idea how to deal with her odd teacher. On the first day, her teacher, Miss Caroline, criticizes her for already knowing how to read and forbids her from writing in cursive. ![]() Scout starts school, which she hates despite looking forward to it. Summer ends, and Dill returns to Mississippi. On a dare, Jem runs up and touches the Radley house, and Scout is sure she sees someone watching them from inside behind a curtain. Local children believe that he’s impossibly tall, drools, and eats neighborhood cats and squirrels. A man named Nathan Radley owns the house, but it is his reclusive brother, Arthur Radley (whom the children call Boo) who interests and terrifies them-he is supposedly locked up in the house and once stabbed his father, Mr. The three children become friends, and, pushed by Dill's wild imagination, soon become obsessed with a nearby house called Radley Place. One year, a boy named Dill comes to spend the summer with his aunt, the Finches' neighbor Miss Rachel. ![]() ![]() Scout and Jem spend much of their time creating and acting out fantasies. Scout, however, finds Calpurnia tyrannical and believes that Calpurnia favors Jem over her. He relies on the family's black cook, Calpurnia, to help raise the kids. Atticus is a lawyer and makes enough to keep the family comfortably out of poverty, but he works long days. In the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the middle of the Great Depression, six-year-old Scout Finch lives with her older brother, Jem, and her widowed father, Atticus.
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