| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: there and then; all knew it to be so and hung back; and for
many seconds by the cabin clock, the trio sat motionless and
silent.
Then came an interruption, welcome as the flowers in May.
'Land ho!' sang out a voice on deck. 'Land a weatha bow!'
'Land!' cried Davis, springing to his feet. 'What's this? There
ain't no land here.'
And as men may run from the chamber of a murdered corpse,
the three ran forth out of the house and left their quarrel
behind them, undecided.
The sky shaded down at the sea level to the white of opals; the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and
the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years
of human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary
Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.
The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from
that time forth, into a petty seaport town.
And now--can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: an oyster on a stall.
You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of shells,
which you would never pick up along the beach; and if you are
conchologizing in earnest, you must not forget to bring home a tin
box of shell sand, to be washed and picked over in a dish at your
leisure, or forget either to wash through a fine sieve, over the
boat's side, any sludge and ooze which the dredge brings up. Many
- I may say, hundreds - rare and new shells are found in this way,
and in no other.
But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat,
and the time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation
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