| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,
the shame were indelible if WE should lose it. Gentleness and
cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect
duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have
neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom
Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend
upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may
be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should
spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on
pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: was he dead than he was flung overboard. He died in a night of
wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their
oilskins to the cry of "All hands!" And he was flung overboard,
several hours later, on a day of wind. Not even a canvas wrapping
graced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of
iron at his feet. We sewed him up in the blankets in which he
died and laid him on a hatch-cover for'ard of the main-hatch on
the port side. A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was
fastened to his feet.
It was bitter cold. The weather-side of every rope, spar, and
stay was coated with ice, while all the rigging was a harp,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: of appearance, the second set it for the evening of the same day.
Now, these two points of the United States territory are not less
than eight hundred miles apart. Even granting the automobile this
unthinkable speed, greater than any it had yet shown, how could it
have crossed all the intervening country unseen? How could it
traverse the States of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin, from
end to end without anyone of our agents giving us warning, without
any interested person rushing to a telephone?
After these two momentary appearances, if appearances they were, the
machine again dropped out of knowledge. Mr. Ward did not think it
worth while to dispatch me and my men to either point whence it had
|
