| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: talked of dressing the salad, the hapless youths trembled as they
thought of the thrift with which her prudent hand dispensed the oil.
They could never think of spending a night away from the house without
having given, long before, a plausible reason for such an
irregularity. Every Sunday, each in his turn, two of them accompanied
the Guillaume family to Mass at Saint-Leu, and to vespers.
Mesdemoiselles Virginie and Augustine, simply attired in cotton print,
each took the arm of an apprentice and walked in front, under the
piercing eye of their mother, who closed the little family procession
with her husband, accustomed by her to carry two large prayer-books,
bound in black morocco. The second apprentice received no salary. As
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: ETHAN BRAND
A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE
Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed
with charcoal, sat watching his kiln at nightfall, while his
little son played at building houses with the scattered fragments
of marble, when, on the hill-side below them, they heard a roar
of laughter, not mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind
shaking the boughs of the forest.
"Father, what is that?" asked the little boy, leaving his play,
and pressing betwixt his father's knees.
"Oh, some drunken man, I suppose," answered the lime-burner;
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: not let these great folk of old into our drawing-rooms.
Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a
housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking
from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited
the glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his
way of thinking, any one he could strike hands with and talk
to freely and without offence, save perhaps the porter at the
end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who
loafs all day before the public-house. So that this little
note of vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it is to
be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old
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