| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: offer'd a pinch on both sides of him: it was a gift of consequence,
and modestly declined. - The poor little fellow pressed it upon
them with a nod of welcomeness. - PRENEZ EN - PRENEZ, said he,
looking another way; so they each took a pinch. - Pity thy box
should ever want one! said I to myself; so I put a couple of sous
into it - taking a small pinch out of his box, to enhance their
value, as I did it. He felt the weight of the second obligation
more than of the first, - 'twas doing him an honour, - the other
was only doing him a charity; - and he made me a bow down to the
ground for it.
- Here! said I to an old soldier with one hand, who had been
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: revery or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a
light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked
at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly,
and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming
of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then,
after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and
six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another
chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and
tremulousness and meditation as before.
But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent
revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: taste for the oxidized-silver setting of a musical comedy.
Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table. Her right arm rested
upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously manipulated a sealed
letter. The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren; and in the upper
left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold palette.
It had been delivered at nine o'clock, after Nevada had left.
Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter
contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam, or
a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally approved methods,
because her position in society forbade such an act. She had tried to
read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a
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