| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: stored their powder in a kind of outbuilding which they constructed,
placing it at a distance for safety's sake. When most of the surviving
men were away, however, a grass fire set light to this outbuilding and
all the powder blew up.
After this, for a while they supplied the camp with food by the help of
such ammunition as remained to them. When that failed they dug pits in
which to catch game. In time the buck came to know of these pits, so
that they snared no more.
Then, as the "biltong" or sun-dried meat they had made was all consumed,
they were driven to every desperate expedient that is known to the
starving, such as the digging up of bulbs, the boiling of grass, twigs
Marie |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: that pink checked towels did to help to dry themselves after helping
to dry so many little pink fingers. Often, so often, little brown
sparrows came hopping to the gravel to pick up any tiny crumbs of
cake that the little girls dropped, but you may be sure that they
did not drop so very many, many little brown crumbs for little brown
birds to find.
But if they were dropped, even if by rare chance were the crumbs so
large as to be nearly as large as half of a cake--why then, that
crumb had to stay for those little birds. It was the law! The law
that the little girls had made for themselves, and nobody but
themselves knew about that law--for the good of the birds. But no
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: what might be called a subterranean county, which, to be habitable,
needed only the rays of the sun, or, for want of that, the light
of a special planet.
Water had collected in various hollows, forming vast ponds,
or rather lakes larger than Loch Katrine, lying just above them.
Of course the waters of these lakes had no movement of currents or tides;
no old castle was reflected there; no birch or oak trees waved on
their banks. And yet these deep lakes, whose mirror-like surface
was never ruffled by a breeze, would not be without charm by the light
of some electric star, and, connected by a string of canals,
would well complete the geography of this strange domain.
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