14. The children who played together to-day by the Sambre and Oise canal each at his own father’s threshold when and where might they next meet
15. I began with a remark upon their dog which had somewhat the look of a pointer
16. The only buildings that had any interest for us were the hotel and the café
17. Not long after the drums had passed the café [we] began to grow sleepy and set out for the hotel which was only a door or two away
The Semicolon.
1. The semicolon is a kind of weak full-stop, i.e. period. Nearly always it separates clauses that are grammatically able to get along without each other, but that are closely related in sense. So rare indeed are the cases in which the semicolon may be used with a dependent clause, that a high school student may properly ignore them. For the present, avoid using the semicolon to point a dependent clause.
2. Sometimes the semicolon punctuates a series of mere phrases. This occurs if some particular emphasis is desired for them, or if they are too long to be set off by commas. Example:—
An enormous smoke-stack blocks my view; built of brick, and massive; blue in the cold winter mist; glowing like a pillar of fire as soon as the sunlight reaches it; the most changing, the most stable, thing is this landscape.
Oral Exercise.—Which statements in the following sentences are independent? which dependent? (It need hardly be suggested that the necessity of understanding a subject or a predicate does not make a statement dependent.)