| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby
crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose
gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August
evening--how can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend
into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with "the
boys"?
No, it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose
interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying:--"All
is barren!"
Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my memory
skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was exclusively his.
Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I felt how well I
knew him now from the impressions he made then on my child's mind,
though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty years.
Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet within
the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance
that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been
born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well.
It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially
for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: still.
"I'm for off up the muirs, Dandie," she said.
There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him look up.
She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace remained of the levity
of the morning.
"Ay, lass? Ye'll have yer ups and downs like me, I'm thinkin'," he
observed.
"What for do ye say that?" she asked.
"O, for naething," says Dand. "Only I think ye're mair like me than the
lave of them. Ye've mair of the poetic temper, tho' Guid kens little
enough of the poetic taalent. It's an ill gift at the best. Look at
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