| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: speeches which cost nothing and are worth millions. One evening, when
the Sovereign was out of spirits, he smiled on hearing of the
existence of another Demoiselle de Fontaine, for whom he found a
husband in the person of a young magistrate, of inferior birth, no
doubt, but wealthy, and whom he created Baron. When, the year after,
the Vendeen spoke of Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine, the King replied
in his thin sharp tones, "Amicus Plato sed magis amica Natio." Then, a
few days later, he treated his "friend Fontaine" to a quatrain,
harmless enough, which he styled an epigram, in which he made fun of
these three daughters so skilfully introduced, under the form of a
trinity. Nay, if report is to be believed, the monarch had found the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly
open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being
as himself. There sat a youth beside him on the college
benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at
intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have
it washed. It was my friend's principle to stay away as
often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.
But there was something that came home to him sharply, in
this fellow who had to give over study till his shirt was
washed, and the scores of others who had never an opportunity
at all. IF ONE OF THESE COULD TAKE HIS PLACE, he thought;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: there is an entry of these things--it is there to this day, and I
cannot do better than reproduce it here to witness that this book
is indeed a true one, and no lying fable written to while away an
hour.
At last he fell a-yawning so much that very reluctantly indeed he
set about finishing this great and splendid day. (Alas! that all
days must end at last! ) He got his candle in the hall from a
friendly waiting-maid, and passed upward--whither a modest
novelist, who writes for the family circle, dare not follow. Yet
I may tell you that he knelt down at his bedside, happy and
drowsy, and said, "Our Father 'chartin' heaven," even as he had
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