| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: they are mines--not gold mines, but something richer still--food
mines, which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages
and ages since, as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and
lifted them up, and pared them away with her ice-plough and her
rain-spade, and spread the stuff of them over the wide carses
round, to make in that bleak northern climate, which once carried
nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed a great
people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant
self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of
Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the
ablest little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: man evidently poorer than ourselves! Juste sat down to write to every
member of his family, and I went off to effect a loan. I brought in
twenty francs lent me by a fellow-provincial. In that evil but happy
day gambling was still tolerated, and in its lodes, as hard as the
rocky ore of Brazil, young men, by risking a small sum, had a chance
of winning a few gold pieces. My friend, too, had some Turkish tobacco
brought home from Constantinople by a sailor, and he gave me quite as
much as we had taken from Z. Marcas. I conveyed the splendid cargo
into port, and we went in triumph to repay our neighbor with a tawny
wig of Turkish tobacco for his dark /Caporal/.
"You are determined not to be my debtors," said he. "You are giving me
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: upon a rock of granite, capriciously cut out like a camp-bed; there he
fell asleep without taking any precaution to defend himself while he
slept. He had made the sacrifice of his life. His last thought was one
of regret. He repented having left the Maugrabins, whose nomadic life
seemed to smile upon him now that he was far from them and without
help. He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays fell with all
their force on the granite and produced an intolerable heat--for he
had had the stupidity to place himself adversely to the shadow thrown
by the verdant majestic heads of the palm trees. He looked at the
solitary trees and shuddered--they reminded him of the graceful shafts
crowned with foliage which characterize the Saracen columns in the
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