| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: these intolerable liberties, I had fled from the house in
terror, indignation, and amazement.
'Teresa,' said my father, with singular gravity of voice, 'I
must make to-day a call upon your courage; much must be told
you, there is much that you must do to help me; and my
daughter must prove herself a woman by her spirit. As for
this Mendizabal, what shall I say? or how am I to tell you
what she is? Twenty years ago, she was the loveliest of
slaves; to-day she is what you see her - prematurely old,
disgraced by the practice of every vice and every nefarious
industry, but free, rich, married, they say, to some
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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: what he now professes. As for science proper, it has reached at his
hands only the quasimorphologic stage; that is, it consists of
catalogues concocted according to the ingenuity of the individual
and resembles the real thing about as much as a haphazard
arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble a man.
Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the
mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific
collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of
phenomena forms to his idea the acme of erudition. His mathematics,
for example, consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no
explanation is ever vouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: many well-grown palms; draughts of the dying breeze swung
them together overhead; and on all sides, with a swiftness
beyond dragon-flies or swallows, the spots of sunshine flitted,
and hovered, and returned. Underfoot, the sand was fairly solid
and quite level, and Herrick's steps fell there noiseless as in
new-fallen snow. It bore the marks of having been once weeded
like a garden alley at home; but the pestilence had done its
work, and the weeds were returning. The buildings of the
settlement showed here and there through the stems of the
colonnade, fresh painted, trim and dandy, and all silent as the
grave. Only, here and there in the crypt, there was a rustle and
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