The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: the bow of my canoe. The oldest has gone to Pennsylvanie; he peels
the bark there for the tanning of leather. The second had the
misfortune of breaking his leg, so that he can no longer kneel to
paddle. He has descended to the making of shoes. Joseph is my
third pupil. And I have still a younger one at home waiting to
come into my school."
A touch of family life like that is always refreshing, and doubly
so in the wilderness. For what is fatherhood at its best,
everywhere, but the training of good men to take the teacher's
place when his work is done? Some day, when Johnny's rheumatism
has made his joints a little stiffer and his eyes have lost
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: In the next hour I got a couple more, and they went the way of the
first one, down the throats of the detachment. That satisfied the
survivors, and they went away and left us in peace.
"We hadn't any more adventures, though I kept awake all night and
was ready. From midnight on the child got very restless, and out
of her head, and moaned, and said, 'Water, water - thirsty'; and
now and then, 'Kiss me, Soldier'; and sometimes she was in her fort
and giving orders to her garrison; and once she was in Spain, and
thought her mother was with her. People say a horse can't cry; but
they don't know, because we cry inside.
"It was an hour after sunup that I heard the boys coming, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: the most true view. Try to separate from the mass of their
statements that which is common to Socrates, Isaiah, David, St.
Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan - yes, and George
Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something could be
written down in a set of propositions like Euclid, neither will you
deny that there is something common and this something very
valuable. . . . I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment's
thought to the question of what community they belong to - I hope
they will belong to the great community.' I should observe that as
time went on his conformity to the church in which he was born grew
more complete, and his views drew nearer the conventional. 'The
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