| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: locking the fruit-garden, "won't you have the /pot-au-feu/ put on once
or twice a week on account of your nephew?"
"Yes."
"Am I to go to the butcher's?"
"Certainly not. We will make the broth of fowls; the farmers will
bring them. I shall tell Cornoiller to shoot some crows; they make the
best soup in the world."
"Isn't it true, monsieur, that crows eat the dead?"
"You are a fool, Nanon. They eat what they can get, like the rest of
the world. Don't we all live on the dead? What are legacies?"
Monsieur Grandet, having no further orders to give, drew out his
 Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: fix you up, and Mrs. Dal knows all about the arm. I told her."
(Stogie is his Japanese factotum, so called because he is lean, a
yellowish brown in color, and because he claims to have been shipped
into this country in a box.)
The Cinematograph was finishing the program. The house was dark and
the music had stopped, as it does in the circus just before somebody
risks his neck at so much a neck in the Dip of Death, or the
hundred-foot dive. Then, with a sort of shock, I saw on the white
curtain the announcement:
THE NEXT PICTURE
IS THE DOOMED WASHINGTON FLIER, TAKEN A SHORT DISTANCE FROM THE
 The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: And they did go quick. They fitted up the Susquehanna for her
new destination. Her powerful machinery was brought to bear
upon the hauling-chains. The aluminum projectile only weighed
19,250 pounds, a weight very inferior to that of the transatlantic
cable which had been drawn up under similar conditions. The only
difficulty was in fishing up a cylindro-conical projectile, the
walls of which were so smooth as to offer no hold for the hooks.
On that account Engineer Murchison hastened to San Francisco,
and had some enormous grappling-irons fixed on an automatic
system, which would never let the projectile go if it once
succeeded in seizing it in its powerful claws. Diving-dresses
 From the Earth to the Moon |