| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: phaeton, and promised to return it before night to Naseby
House; only a deaf, snuffy, and stern old man remained to
play propriety for Dick and Esther.
Before the phaeton had driven off, the girl had entered the
station and seated herself upon a bench. The endless, empty
moorlands stretched before her, entirely unenclosed, and with
no boundary but the horizon. Two lines of rails, a waggon
shed, and a few telegraph posts, alone diversified the
outlook. As for sounds, the silence was unbroken save by the
chant of the telegraph wires and the crying of the plovers on
the waste. With the approach of midday the wind had more and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: the two complementary aspects of one and the same state of
society."
The image thus evoked is very vivid, and all the adversaries of
the speaker felt themselves threatened by it. They conjured up a
double vision of the fever-haunted country and the vessel that
may carry them away; for is it not possible that they are
included in the somewhat ill-defined category of the politicians
menaced? They experienced the lurking fear that the men of the
Convention must have felt whom the vague speeches of Robespierre
threatened with the guillotine, and who, under the influence of
this fear, invariably yielded to him.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: a little hydrochloric or oxalic acid, or caustic potash may be put
in the water, according as the stains are from grease or from ink.
Here is where an unpractised binder will probably injure a book for life.
If the chemicals are too strong, or the sheets remain too long in
the bath, or are not thoroughly cleansed from the bleach before they
are re-sized, the certain seeds of decay are planted in the paper,
and although for a time the leaves may look bright to the eye,
and even crackle under the hand like the soundest paper,
yet in the course of a few years the enemy will appear, the fibre
will decay, and the existence of the books will terminate in a state
of white tinder.
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