| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in
these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick
players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is
rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything
is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all
tend.
I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.
It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and
youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case
of emergency. It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
lamented and forgotten.
At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of the circle.
He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits of
these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses,
their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
"Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and
characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's
life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of
variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they
are wisest. They are the magi.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
