| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: tingle with a chorus of plaintive voices, half-drowned in a rushing
noise as of pouring rain.
Vendramin saw himself in an ancient Venetian costume, looking on at
the ceremony of the /Bucentaur/. The Frenchman, who plainly discerned
that some strange and painful mystery stood between the Prince and the
Duchess, was racking his brain with shrewd conjecture to discover what
it could be.
The scene had changed. In front of a fine picture, representing the
Desert and the Red Sea, the Egyptians and Hebrews marched and
countermarched without any effect on the feelings of the four persons
in the Duchess' box. But when the first chords on the harps preluded
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: man, famous for his wisdom and his habit of drooling on his shirt-
front, suggested that they first catch their hare. So the Chairman
appointed a committee to watch for the victim at midnight, and take
him as he should attempt to sneak into town across-lots from the
tamarack swamp. At this point in the proceedings they were
interrupted by the sound of a brass band. Their dishonoured
representative was driving up from the railway station in a coach-
and-four, with music and a banner. A few moments later he entered
the hall, went upon the platform, and said it was the proudest
moment of his life. (Cheers.)
A Statesman
Fantastic Fables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was
stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after
that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
Long Odds |
