| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: (as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same
jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-
Norman likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of
high nobility, all worked together, as at home, to form the Free
Commoners of England.
If any should wish to know more on this curious and important
subject, let me recommend them to study Ferguson's "Teutonic Name
System," a book from which you will discover that some of our
quaintest, and seemingly most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too,
which are extinct in England, but remain in America--are really
corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions,
and erasures.
My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out
afresh.
In the morning there would lie the pages on her table,
neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear
handwriting, and everything ready so that when
"Lyovótchka" got up he could send the proof-sheets off by
post.
¹Pazanki, tracks of a hare, name given to the
last joint of the hind legs.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: and mineral--is a fairy-tale. You can read it in books. You
would never believe me.
All manner of nourishing food, from sea-fish to beef, may be
bought at the lowest prices, and the people are consequently
well-developed and of a high stomach. They demand ten shillings
for tinkering a jammed lock of a trunk; they receive sixteen
shillings a day for working as carpenters; they spend many
sixpences on very bad cigars, which the poorest of them smoke,
and they go mad over a prize-fight. When they disagree they do
so fatally, with fire-arms in their hands, and on the public
streets. I was just clear of Mission Street when the trouble
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