| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: And dines on the following day.
"The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.
"The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which is constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes--
A sentiment open to doubt.
"The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
 The Hunting of the Snark |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: from the moment Ichabod Crane made his advances, the interests of
the former evidently declined: his horse was no longer seen tied
to the palings on Sunday nights, and a deadly feud gradually
arose between him and the preceptor of Sleepy Hollow.
Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature,
would fain have carried matters to open warfare and have settled
their pretensions to the lady, according to the mode of those
most concise and simple reasoners, the knights-errant of yore, --
by single combat; but lchabod was too conscious of the superior
might of his adversary to enter the lists against him; he had
overheard a boast of Bones, that he would "double the
 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: pleasant to deal with." Consequently, during his lifetime, his
townsmen kept silence about him and treated him civilly. His wife, a
demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her girlhood (which was
said to be a reason why the doctor married her), gave birth to a son,
and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly, ten years after her
brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor though he were, by
surprise. This late-comer was named Agathe.
These little facts are so simple, so commonplace, that a writer seems
scarcely justified in placing them in the fore-front of his history;
yet if they are not known, a man of Doctor Rouget's stamp would be
thought a monster, an unnatural father, when, in point of fact, he was
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