| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: find a new bird and kill it. Their name is ornitholo-
gers, and I could have been an ornithologer myself,
because I always loved birds and creatures; and I
started out to learn how to be one, and I see a bird
setting on a limb of a high tree, singing with its head
tilted back and its mouth open, and before I thought I
fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down
from the limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked
him up and he was dead, and his body was warm in my
hand, and his head rolled about this way and that, like
his neck was broke, and there was a little white skin
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: electro-motive force, ascribed by Volta to the metals, when in
contact, is a force which, as long as a free course is allowed to
the electricity it sets in motion, is never expended, and continues
to be excited with undiminished power in the production of a
never-ceasing effect. Against the truth of such a supposition the
probabilities are all but infinite.' When this argument, which he
employed independently, had clearly fixed itself in his mind,
Faraday never cared to experiment further on the source of
electricity in the voltaic pile. The argument appeared to him
'to remove the foundation itself of the contact theory,' and he
afterwards let it crumble down in peace.[1]
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: horse to smoke a pipe. But when he felt in his pocket he found but
two matches. He struck the first, and it would not light.
"Here is a pretty state of things!" said the traveller. "Dying for
a smoke; only one match left; and that certain to miss fire! Was
there ever a creature so unfortunate? And yet," thought the
traveller, "suppose I light this match, and smoke my pipe, and
shake out the dottle here in the grass - the grass might catch on
fire, for it is dry like tinder; and while I snatch out the flames
in front, they might evade and run behind me, and seize upon yon
bush of poison oak; before I could reach it, that would have blazed
up; over the bush I see a pine tree hung with moss; that too would
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