| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: safety of his journey across Siberia depended upon
his making the greater part of it before the heavy
autumn rains swelled the rivers and flooded the
swamps. Winter or summer the journey from Ok-
hotsk to St. Petersburg might be made in four
months; with the wealth and influence at his com-
mand, possibly in less; but in the deluge between
he was liable to detentions lasting nearly as long
again, to say nothing of illness caused by inevitable
exposure.
He stood staring at the palisades for many min-
 Rezanov |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: terior of the chamber. It was still an imposing room.
The boy clapped his hands in delight at the beauties of
the carved and panelled walls and the oak beamed
ceiling, stained almost black from the smoke of torches
and oil cressets that had lighted it in bygone days,
aided, no doubt, by the wood fires which had burned
in its two immense fireplaces to cheer the merry throng
of noble revellers that had so often sat about the great
table into the morning hours.
Here they took up their abode. But the bent, old
woman was no longer an old woman--she had become
 The Outlaw of Torn |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: condition to retreat after "Lovell's Fight."
. . . . . . . . .
The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree-tops, beneath
which two weary and wounded men had stretched their limbs the
night before. Their bed of withered oak leaves was strewn upon
the small level space, at the foot of a rock, situated near the
summit of one of the gentle swells by which the face of the
country is there diversified. The mass of granite, rearing its
smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet above their heads,
was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the veins seemed
to form an inscription in forgotten characters. On a tract of
 Mosses From An Old Manse |