| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it,
the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they
have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round
the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it.
Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile
weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting
specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a
gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black
mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge
on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted
his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: easy to write. And I dare say the Consuls say, 'Why, then,
does he write them?'
I had miserable luck with ST. IVES; being already half-way
through it, a book I had ordered six months ago arrives at
last, and I have to change the first half of it from top to
bottom! How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were
watched over like a female charity school, kept in a
grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week? And I had made
all my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed
anyhow. However, this last is better business; if only the
book had come when I ordered it! A PROPOS, many of the books
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: so great was their confidence in the little man who had saved
their comrades.
The Wizard selected a dozen that seemed intelligent and
good-tempered, and then he opened his black bag and took out a queerly
shaped dish that was silver on the outside and gold on the inside.
Into this dish he poured a powder and set fire to it. It made a thick
smoke that quite enveloped the twelve monkeys, as well as the form of
the Wizard, but when the smoke cleared away the dish had been changed
to a golden cage with silver bars, and the twelve monkeys had become
about three inches high and were all seated comfortably inside the cage.
The thousands of hairy animals who had witnessed this act of magic
The Magic of Oz |
