| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: its resting place against its side, and the unexpected clatter made
several women, nervously inclined, jump in their seats. Observing
them, McIntyre smiled and was still smiling amusedly when Penfield
addressed him.
"Did you observe many lights burning in your house when you
returned?" asked Penfield.
"No, only those which are usually left lit at night."
"Was your daughter Helen awake?"
"I do not know. Her room was in darkness when I walked past her
door on my way to bed."
Penfield removed his eye-glasses and polished them on his silk
The Red Seal |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: origin, built on ballads and the adventures of the Young
Chevalier; and in Burns it is the more excusable, because he
lay out of the way of active politics in his youth. With the
great French Revolution, something living, practical, and
feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm of
human action. The young ploughman who had desired so
earnestly to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole
nation animated with the same desire. Already in 1788 we
find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new popular
doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against the zeal
of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: every county has a valley more or less resembling Glendearg; and
if castles like Tillietudlem, or mansions like the Baron of
Bradwardine's, are now less frequently to be met with, it is
owing to the rage of indiscriminate destruction, which has
removed or ruined so many monuments of antiquity, when they were
not protected by their inaccessible situation. [I would
particularly intimate the Kaim of Uric, on the eastern coast of
Scotland, as having suggested an idea for the tower called Wolf's
Crag, which the public more generally identified with the ancient
tower of Fast Castle.]
The scraps of poetry which have been in most cases tacked to the
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