| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with a
biography of Tonti--birthplace, parentage, genius probably
inherited from his mother, remarkable instance of precocity,
etc--and a complete treatise on the system to which he bequeathed
his name. The material is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I
scorn to appear vainglorious. Tonti is dead, and I never saw
anyone who even pretended to regret him; and, as for the tontine
system, a word will suffice for all the purposes of this
unvarnished narrative.
A number of sprightly youths (the more the merrier) put up a
certain sum of money, which is then funded in a pool under
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: 'Julia leaves this place tomorrow,' replied Morris. 'She must go
up to town and get the house ready, and find servants. We shall
all follow in three days.'
'Oh, brayvo!' cried John. 'But why?'
'I've found it out, John,' returned his brother gently.
'It? What?' enquired John.
'Why Michael won't compromise,' said Morris. 'It's because he
can't. It's because Masterman's dead, and he's keeping it dark.'
'Golly!' cried the impressionable John. 'But what's the use? Why
does he do it, anyway?'
'To defraud us of the tontine,' said his brother.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: the force.
CHAPTER VIII.
NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't be there to
put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the
alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had
gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the
art of portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an
allowance had threatened to withdraw it if he should, under
specious pretexts, turn for superior truth to Paris - Paris being
somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of evil, the abyss. I
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