A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, ____31____ to waist-high rains, smelly and dirty.Before the trip, I'd had my car fixed. When the office ____32____ of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. "You from New Orleans?" she asked. I said I was, "No charge." She said, and ____33____ shock her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also ____34____ off a mortgage （抵押货款） on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was ____35____ . We'd began to accept that we'd have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a ____36____,when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California. He'd read some pieces I'd written about our ____37____ for Slate, the online magazine and wanted to give us ("no conditions attached") a new house across the lake from New Orleans. It ____38____ a good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, then we had no plan to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me, while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather ____39____. I mentioned the poet's offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months. Throughout this painful ____40____, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It's almost worth losing your wordy possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance.