| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini: either in their own work or by the employment
of a ``Fire Artist.'' Although seldom presenting
it in his recent performances, Ching Ling
Foo is a fire-eater of the highest type, refining
the effect with the same subtle artistry that
marks all the work of this super-magician.
Of Foo's thousand imitators the only
positively successful one was William E. Robinson,
whose tragic death while in the performance of
the bullet-catching trick is the latest addition to
the long list of casualties chargeable to that
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: rocks jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and,
while Thornton poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the
bank with the end in his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared
the ledge. This it did, and was flying down-stream in a current
as swift as a mill-race, when Hans checked it with the rope and
checked too suddenly. The boat flirted over and snubbed in to the
bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer out of it, was carried
down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids, a stretch of wild
water in which no swimmer could live.
Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred
yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around--
above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement,
and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said,
(and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and
the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that
silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for
centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made
him what I now saw him--what he was. Such opinions need no
comment, and I will make none.
The Fall of the House of Usher |
