| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education.
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.
And so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to
our trade, it should not be from any reason of a higher wage,
but because it was a trade which was useful in a very great
and in a very high degree; which every honest tradesman could
make more serviceable to mankind in his single strength;
which was difficult to do well and possible to do better
every year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part
of all who practised it, and hence became a perpetual
education to their nobler natures; and which, pay it as you
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: not if I cried a good deal first?"
"Come, come, take a cup o' tea and stop your tongue, do," said
good-humoured Mrs. Kimble, feeling some pride in a husband who must
be regarded as so clever and amusing by the company generally. If
he had only not been irritable at cards!
While safe, well-tested personalities were enlivening the tea in
this way, the sound of the fiddle approaching within a distance at
which it could be heard distinctly, made the young people look at
each other with sympathetic impatience for the end of the meal.
"Why, there's Solomon in the hall," said the Squire, "and playing
my fav'rite tune, _I_ believe--"The flaxen-headed ploughboy"--
Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: marked the Folwell burying-ground.
Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night.
Still moving and living in the free circles of nature,
he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless,
fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark
to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain
and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped
victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as
Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of
wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away
to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-
The Voice of the City |
