| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: "Oh, good and great!--if you knew! Now go, dear."
"I have not kept you from your work, have I?"
"No; I have not been working lately. Good-by, dear."
The younger woman went; and the elder knelt down by the chair, and wailed
like a little child when you have struck it and it does not dare to cry
loud.
A year after; it was early spring again.
The woman sat at her desk writing; behind her the fire burnt brightly. She
was writing a leading article on the causes which in differing peoples lead
to the adoption of Free Trade or Protectionist principles.
The woman wrote on quickly. After a while the servant entered and laid a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-
and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at
their head.
But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way
about everything. I hold any man cheap, - he said, - of whom
nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.
- How is that, Professor? - said I; - I should have set you down
for one of that sort. - Sir, - said he, - I am proud to say, that
Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck
without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: nevertheless, retains some glimmer of hope. His mistress illumined
each difficulty. To him she was no longer a woman, but a supernatural
being seen through the incense of his desires. A feeble cry, which he
fancied came from the hotel de Poitiers, restored him to himself and
to a sense of his true situation. Throwing himself on his pallet to
reflect on his course, he heard a slight movement which echoed faintly
from the spiral staircase. He listened attentively, and the whispered
words, "He has gone to bed," said by the old woman, reached his ear.
By an accident unknown probably to the architect, the slightest noise
on the staircase sounded in the room of the apprentices, so that
Philippe did not lose a single movement of the miser and his sister
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