| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: time I got a harder master. They have been cruel, every one; they
have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten
me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all. And so I am
but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered
upon my shrunken body - that skin which was once so glossy, that
skin which she loved to stroke with her hand. I was the pride of
the mountains and the Great Plains; now I am a scarecrow and
despised. These piteous wrecks that are my comrades here say we
have reached the bottom of the scale, the final humiliation; they
say that when a horse is no longer worth the weeds and discarded
rubbish they feed to him, they sell him to the bull-ring for a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: advantage; a single vote might make the decision, and with it two or
three fortunes. The stake was large, and Harkness was a daring
speculator. He was sitting close to the stranger. He leaned over
while one or another of the other Symbols was entertaining the house
with protests and appeals, and asked, in a whisper,
"What is your price for the sack?"
"Forty thousand dollars."
"I'll give you twenty."
"No."
"Twenty-five."
"No."
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: gossip the whole way about things better left unspoken; or, if they
were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating on politics or
metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and return with
their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set
out. I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a
certain celebrated passage; and that it was not "sitting on a hill
apart," but tramping four miles out and four miles in along a
turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed
"Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."
Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we
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