| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: of pen or pencil. During ten or fifteen years I had been, as it were,
dragging a heavy chain which no strength of mine could break;
I was not only a slave, but a slave for life. I might become a husband,
a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle
to the grave, I had felt myself doomed. All efforts I had previously made
to secure my freedom had not only failed, but had seemed only to rivet
my fetters the more firmly, and to render my escape more difficult.
Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at times asked myself
the question, May not my condition after all be God's work,
and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, Is not submission my duty?
A contest had in fact been going on in my mind for a long time,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: most motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with
his employers. Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be
deposed; and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable
substitute. He went always scrupulously dressed, and looked the
picture of propriety, like a dark, handsome, stupid, and probably
religious young man hot from a European funeral. In character he
seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen. He wore
gravity like an ornament. None could more nicely represent the
desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of
civilisation and reform. And yet, were the French to go and native
manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men's beards
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: extraordinary a piece to come to my hands at such a moment and under
cover of a Government seal, that I stood stupid. Catriona's grey eyes
shone in my remembrance. I thought, with a bound of pleasure, she must
be the friend. But who should the writer be, to have her billet thus
enclosed with Prestongrange's? And of all wonders, why was it thought
needful to give me this pleasing but most inconsequent intelligence
upon the Bass? For the writer, I could hit upon none possible except
Miss Grant. Her family, I remembered, had remarked on Catriona's eyes
and even named her for their colour; and she herself had been much in
the habit to address me with a broad pronunciation, by way of a sniff,
I supposed, at my rusticity. No doubt, besides, but she lived in the
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