| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: we may be sure that Abraham did his full share both of work and
management. The elder Gentry paid Lincoln eight dollars a month
and his passage home on a steamboat for this service. The voyage
was made successfully, although not without adventure; for one
night, after the boat was tied up to the shore, the boys were
attacked by seven negroes, who came aboard intending to kill and
rob them. There was a lively scrimmage, in which, though slightly
hurt, they managed to beat off their assailants, and then,
hastily cutting their boat adrift, swung out on the stream. The
marauding band little dreamed that they were attacking the man
who in after years was to give their race its freedom; and though
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: proportion of the folk of Scotland: occupying the eastern and
the central parts, from the Firth of Forth, or perhaps the
Lammermoors, upon the south, to the Ord of Caithness on the
north. That the blundering guess of a dull chronicler should
have inspired men with imaginary loathing for their own
ancestors is already strange: that it should have begotten
this wild legend seems incredible. Is it possible the
chronicler's error was merely nominal? that what he told, and
what the people proved themselves so ready to receive, about
the Picts, was true or partly true of some anterior and
perhaps Lappish savages, small of stature, black of hue,
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: he could not bring himself to take into his confidence
at this juncture; and the other went on with his intimate
outpourings, and as remote from his hearer as though
he had been talking on a hill-top a mile away.
He was in a bit of a quandary now as to the steamer
Sofala. Ultimately every hitch in the port came into
his hands to undo. They would miss him when he was
gone in another eighteen months, and most likely some
retired naval officer had been pitchforked into the ap-
pointment--a man that would understand nothing and
care less. That steamer was a coasting craft having a
End of the Tether |
