Narrative tenses

Use this exercise to test your use of narrative tenses in English

Read the following passage taking note of the tenses used and then put the events listed below into the correct order chronologically.

Then one morning - and perhaps this was the most cruel moment of all-I went out very early into the garden. The ground was still blue with memory of the night and only the hill tops and one far sail of cloud had caught the sun. I then discovered that a dog had come in the night and trampled , it had damaged the last of our roses, a thick swollen red bud, almost mature and racing the winter for its fulfilment. There it now was, sagging from a broken stem, a tender crimson top staining the silver dew.

Slight as it was, my sorrow and sense of undeserved injury came to a point in that moment. It seemed to me as if nothing in life, animal, mineral or vegetable, was safe or excluded from this fatal circle of being hurt and hurting. The inevitable and inescapable logic of everything seemed to be one endless chain of hurt. To hurt and to be hurt, there was no other way.

Oh, on that dew silver morning, bent over the rose, I came near defeat. But mercifully the mood did not last for it was not complete and whole, and therefore,was not true. I can think of no worse death than living an untruth truly, living the part as if it were the whole. And at that moment I was near it. What saved me was the image of David doing he knew not what. David making mud pies on Edward George in his baptismal lace, David in a mediumistic trance at his mother's window putting a gold sovereign in his breast pocket, and above all, David running away from lightening in sunlight.

arrange the events below chronologically:

1. David makes mud pies
2. the rose sags from a broken stem
3. the writer feels sorrow and defeat
4. David runs away from lightening
5. the writer goes into the garden
6. the dog damages the roses
7. david puts a gold sovereign into his pocket
8. the writer discovers that the dog has trampled on the flower beds

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