| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: "Oh, what is that?" cried Malaga; "it all sounds like gibberish to me.
As you thought the sturgeon so excellent at dinner, let me take out
the value of the sauce in lessons in chicanery."
"Very well," said Desroches. "Suppose that a man owes you money, and
your creditors serve a writ of attachment upon him; there is nothing
to prevent all your other creditors from doing the same thing. And now
what does the court do when all the creditors make application for
orders to pay? /The court divides the whole sum attached,
proportionately among them all./ That division, made under the eye of
a magistrate, is what we call a /contribution/. If you owe ten
thousand francs, and your creditors issue writs of attachment on a
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini: holding in the mouth a sponge saturated with
the purest gasoline. When the breath is
exhaled sharply it can be lighted from a torch
or a candle. Closing the lips firmly will
extinguish the flame. A wad of oakum will give
better results than the sponge.
Natural gas is produced as simply. A T-shaped
gas pipe has three or four gas tips on
the cross-piece. The long end is placed in the
mouth, which already holds concealed a
sponge, or preferably a ball of oakum, saturated
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: less than 1,OOO,OOO. A mechanic's average wage was
3 cents a day, when he paid his own keep. By this
rule the national government's expenses were $90,000
a year, or about $250 a day. Thus, by the substitu-
tion of nickels for gold on a king's-evil day, I not
only injured no one, dissatisfied no one, but pleased
all concerned and saved four-fifths of that day's
national expense into the bargain -- a saving which
would have been the equivalent of $800,000 in my
day in America. In making this substitution I had
drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source -- the
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
