| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: for five or six days, blockading the port, and stopping incoming
and outgoing vessels at his pleasure, so that, for the time, the
commerce of the province was entirely paralyzed. All the vessels
so stopped he held as prizes, and all the crews and passengers
(among the latter of whom was more than one provincial worthy of
the day) he retained as though they were prisoners of war.
And it was a mightily awkward thing for the good folk of
Charleston to behold day after day a black flag with its white
skull and crossbones fluttering at the fore of the pirate
captain's craft, over across the level stretch of green salt
marshes; and it was mightily unpleasant, too, to know that this
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: discovered the object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the
community had learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries.
He insisted on keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in
the cellar of his house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on
them. But then the month of June came round he grew uneasy with the
restless anxiety of a madman about the sale of the sack and the
puncheons. Madame Margaritis could nearly always persuade him that the
wine had been sold at an enormous price, which she paid over to him,
and which he hid so cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant
who watched him had ever been able to discover its hiding-place.
The evening before Gaudissart reached Vouvray Madame Margaritis had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: money in the bank, in order to my having interest for it; but
still some difficult or other came in the way, which he objected
as not safe; and I found such a sincere disinterested honesty
in him, that I began to muse with myself, that I had certainly
found the honest man I wanted, and that I could never put
myself into better hands; so I told him with a great deal of
frankness that I had never met with a man or woman yet that
I could trust, or in whom I could think myself safe, but that I
saw he was so disinterestedly concerned for my safety, that I
said I would freely trust him with the management of that little
I had, if he would accept to be steward for a poor widow that
Moll Flanders |
