| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all
sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came
tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile
use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling
sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The
water, except just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--
old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a
tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches.
Twelve feet down in the narrow chasm below the falls, where the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: child-King for whom they were praying was even then a captive in the
hands of his enemies; and a shudder ran through the stranger, as he
thought that a new crime might be committed, and that he could not
choose but take his part in it.
The service came to an end. The priest made a sign to the sisters, and
they withdrew. As soon as he was left alone with the stranger, he went
towards him with a grave, gentle face, and said in fatherly tones:
"My son, if your hands are stained with the blood of the royal martyr,
confide in me. There is no sin that may not be blotted out in the
sight of God by penitence as sincere and touching as yours appears to
be."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: Roby; and, seizing the hands of the disconcerted members, she
administered a series of farewell pressures with the mechanical
haste of a railway-conductor punching tickets.
"I'm so sorry--I'd quite forgotten--" she flung back at them from
the threshold; and as she joined Mrs. Roby, who had turned in
surprise at her appeal, the other ladies had the mortification of
hearing her say, in a voice which she did not take the pains to
lower: "If you'll let me walk a little way with you, I should so
like to ask you a few more questions about Xingu . . ."
III
The incident had been so rapid that the door closed on the
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