| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: jeweled mists, he could not learn to love, had, since long before his
day, been furrowed by the keels of Spain. Traders, and adventurers, and
men of God had passed along this coast, planting their colonies and
cloisters; but it was not his ocean. In the year that we, a thin strip of
patriots away over on the Atlantic edge of the continent, declared
ourselves an independent nation, a Spanish ship, in the name of Saint
Francis, was unloading the centuries of her own civilization at the
Golden Gate. San Diego had come earlier. Then, slowly, as mission after
mission was built along the soft coast wilderness, new ports were
established--at Santa Barbara, and by Point San Luis for San Luis Obispo,
which lay inland a little way up the gorge where it opened among the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: like some industrious factory. And then my curiosity broke
forth. 'In Heaven's name,' I cried, 'what do you make in
this inhuman desert?'
He looked at me with a peculiar smile, and answered with an
evasion -
'This is not the first time,' said he, 'that you have seen my
furnaces alight. One morning, in the small hours, I saw you
driving past; a delicate experiment miscarried; and I cannot
acquit myself of having startled either your driver or the
horse that drew you.'
'What!' cried I, beholding again in fancy the antics of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: Justice Rowan had already arrived. So had McGaw, Dempsey,
Crimmins, Quigg, the president of the board, and one or two of the
trustees. The judge had sent for McGaw and the president, and
they had notified the others.
McGaw sat next to Dempsey. His extreme nervousness of a few days
ago--starting almost at the sound of his own footstep--had given
place to a certain air of bravado, now that everybody in the
village believed the horse had kicked Tom.
Babcock and Tom were by the window, she listless and weary, he
alert and watchful for the slightest point in her favor. She had
on her brown dress, washed clean of the blood-stains, and the silk
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