| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: days--"The House of Aspen."
The Keepsake for 1828 included, however, only three of these
little prose tales, of which the first in order was that entitled
"My Aunt Margaret's Mirror." By way of INTRODUCTION to this,
when now included in a general collection of my lucubrations, I
have only to say that it is a mere transcript, or at least with
very little embellishment, of a story that I remembered being
struck with in my childhood, when told at the fireside by a lady
of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of
the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: answered candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the
hair, puzzled me.
"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of
impressiveness, "that came from a mammoth."
"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my
unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the
earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have
unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to
melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no
living specimen exists. Our explorers--"
At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum: wink of an eye, I shall be with Ozma in her palace."
The elder people remained silent for some time after Dorothy had
spoken. Finally, Aunt Em said, with another sigh of regret:
"If that is the case, Dorothy, perhaps you'd better go and live in the
Emerald City. It will break our hearts to lose you from our lives,
but you will be so much better off with your fairy friends that it
seems wisest and best for you to go."
"I'm not so sure about that," remarked Uncle Henry, shaking his gray
head doubtfully. "These things all seem real to Dorothy, I know; but
I'm afraid our little girl won't find her fairyland just what she had
dreamed it to be. It would make me very unhappy to think that she was
 The Emerald City of Oz |