| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: piece, no end of style; and we cottoned at first sight like
parties in the play. I suppose I spent the chynge of a fiver on
that girl. Well, I 'appened to remember her nyme, so I wrote to
her, and told her 'ow I had got rich, and married a queen in the
Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace. Such a sight of
crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the nigger
parliament in a cocked 'at. It's really prime.'
The captain jumped to his feet. 'That's what you did with the
paper that I went and begged for you?' he roared.
It was perhaps lucky for Huish--it was surely in the end
unfortunate for all--that he was seized just then by one of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: them, in talk, with his own inimitable Scotch-Irish brogue to set it
forth.
A brogue is not a fault. It is a beauty, an heirloom, a
distinction. A local accent is like a landed inheritance; it marks
a man's place in the world, tells where he comes from. Of course it
is possible to have too much of it. A man does not need to carry
the soil of his whole farm around with him on his boots. But,
within limits, the accent of a native region is delightful. 'T is
the flavour of heather in the grouse, the taste of wild herbs and
evergreen-buds in the venison. I like the maple-sugar tang of the
Vermonter's sharp-edged speech; the round, full-waisted r's of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: spirit; they will compare the Ion as being akin both in subject and
treatment; they will urge the authority of Aristotle; and they will detect
in the treatment of the Sophist, in the satirical reasoning upon Homer, in
the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that vice is ignorance, traces of
a Platonic authorship. In reference to the last point we are doubtful, as
in some of the other dialogues, whether the author is asserting or
overthrowing the paradox of Socrates, or merely following the argument
'whither the wind blows.' That no conclusion is arrived at is also in
accordance with the character of the earlier dialogues. The resemblances
or imitations of the Gorgias, Protagoras, and Euthydemus, which have been
observed in the Hippias, cannot with certainty be adduced on either side of
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