| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: what tact! what shrewdness! What does Elisabeth want?"
"Hey! hey!" cried Mitral, "you've got back your bowels of compassion,
papa Gigonnet! That phenomenon has a cause."
"Always a child," said Gobseck to Gigonnet, "you are too quick on the
trigger."
"Come, Gobseck and Gigonnet, listen to me; you want to keep well with
des Lupeaulx, don't you? You've not forgotten how you plucked him in
that affair about the king's debts, and you are afraid he'll ask you
to return some of his feathers," said Mitral.
"Shall we tell him the whole thing?" asked Gobseck, whispering to
Gigonnet.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: "Mars Tom, PLEASE don't say sich things in sich an
awful time as dis. You ain't only reskin' yo' own
self, but you's reskin' us -- same way like Anna Nias
en Siffra. De lake WUZ dah -- I seen it jis' as plain
as I sees you en Huck dis minute."
I says:
"Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one
that seen it first. NOW, then!"
"Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so -- you can't deny it. We
all seen it, en dat PROVE it was dah."
"Proves it! How does it prove it?"
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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: the Calendar of the Covenant, in the person of the father of our
family historian. He "took the sheaf from the mare," however, as
the MS. expresses it, and agreed to accept of the terms of pardon
offered by Government, and sign the bond in evidence he would
give no further ground of offence. My grandsire glosses over his
father's backsliding as smoothly as he can, and comforts himself
with ascribing his want of resolution to his unwillingness to
wreck the ancient name and family, and to permit his lands and
lineage to fall under a doom of forfeiture.
"And indeed," said the venerable compiler, "as, praised be God,
we seldom meet in Scotland with these belly-gods and
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