| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you
might say--"
"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own
mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it
that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent
impressions.
"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity
of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate
answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down
the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger--the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: All Japanese nouns being of this indefinite description, all require
auxiliary numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral,
about which a mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study
merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of
things.
Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless,
for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections,
adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their
protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: the shadows the eye could guess at movement. The confusion
steadied to a kind of rhythm, and into the circle of the fire
came the group of Monumwezis. Again they were gathered together
in a compact little mass; but now they were bent nearly double,
and were stripped to the red blankets about their waists. Before
them writhed Sulimani, close to earth, darting irregularly now to
right, now to left, wriggling, spreading his arms abroad. He was
repeating over and over two phrases; or rather the same phrase
in two such different intonations that they seemed to convey
quite separate meanings.
"Ka soompeele?" he cried with a strongly appealing interrogation.
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