| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: cunning, the ready, the untiring companion of his master, secretly
ordered a cask of vodki to follow the crowd of hunters and
serfs. There was a steel-bright sky, a low, yellow sun, and a
brisk easterly wind from the heights of the Ural. As the crisp
snow began to crunch under the Prince's sled, his followers saw the
old expression come back to his face. With song and halloo and
blast of horns, they swept away into the forest.
Saint John the Hunter must have been on guard over Russia that day.
The great bear was tracked, and after a long and exciting chase,
fell by the hand of Prince Alexis himself. Halt was made in an
open space in the forest, logs were piled together and kindled on
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: up the very springs of good?'
'Murder is to me no special category,' replied the other. 'All
sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like
starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of
famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the
moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is
death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with
such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly
with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I
follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the
thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: The colonel rose and rang the bell, saying to the servant when he
came, "A light!"
The cigars lighted, Monsieur de Trailles endeavored to prevent another
interruption by declaring before he was questioned that he had never
smoked anything more exquisite. Comfortably ensconced in his arm-
chair, the colonel seemed to offer the hope of a less fugacious
attention, and Monsieur de Trailles resumed:--
"All went well at first. To crush the candidate the ministry wanted to
be rid of,--a lawyer, and the worst sort of cad,--I unearthed a
stocking-maker, a fearful fool, whom I persuaded to offer himself as
candidate. The worthy man was convinced that he belonged to the
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