| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: partitions and came from her cousin's chamber. A line of light, thin
as the blade of a sabre, shone through a chink in the door and fell
horizontally on the balusters of the rotten staircase.
"He suffers!" she said, springing up the stairs. A second moan brought
her to the landing near his room. The door was ajar, she pushed it
open. Charles was sleeping; his head hung over the side of the old
armchair, and his hand, from which the pen had fallen, nearly touched
the floor. The oppressed breathing caused by the strained posture
suddenly frightened Eugenie, who entered the room hastily.
"He must be very tired," she said to herself, glancing at a dozen
letters lying sealed upon the table. She read their addresses: "To
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: meet with? The Chilean flag?--but that is tri-color. Brazilian?--it is
green. Japanese?--it is yellow and black, while this--"
At that moment the breeze blew out the unknown flag. Ayrton seizing the
telescope which the sailor had put down, put it to his eye, and in a hoarse
voice, --
"The black flag!" he exclaimed.
And indeed the somber bunting was floating from the mast of the brig, and
they had now good reason for considering her to be a suspicious vessel!
Had the engineer, then, been right in his presentiments? Was this a
pirate vessel? Did she scour the Pacific, competing with the Malay proas
which still infest it? For what had she come to look at the shores of
The Mysterious Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: I am his favorite horse, out of dozens. Big as he is, I have
carried him eighty-one miles between nightfall and sunrise on the
scout; and I am good for fifty, day in and day out, and all the
time. I am not large, but I am built on a business basis. I have
carried him thousands and thousands of miles on scout duty for the
army, and there's not a gorge, nor a pass, nor a valley, nor a
fort, nor a trading post, nor a buffalo-range in the whole sweep of
the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that we don't know as well
as we know the bugle-calls. He is Chief of Scouts to the Army of
the Frontier, and it makes us very important. In such a position
as I hold in the military service one needs to be of good family
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