| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Case of the Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: About half an hour after the departure of the train the watcher came
out of his hiding place and walked noisily past the gate. What he
expected, happened. The dog rushed up to the bars, barking loudly,
but when the peddler had taken a silk muffler from the pack on his
back and held it out to the animal, the noise ceased and the dog's
anger turned to friendliness. Tristan was quite gentle, put his
huge head up to the bars to let the stranger pat it, and seemed not
at all alarmed when the latter rang the bell.
The young man who had opened the door for the Councillor came out
from a wing of the castle. The peddler looked so frozen and yet so
venerable that the youth had not the heart to turn him away.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: great day she dressed Cecile herself, taking as much pains as the
admiral of the British fleet takes over the dressing of the pleasure
yacht for Her Majesty of England when she takes a trip to Germany.
Pons and Schmucke, on their side, cleaned, swept, and dusted Pons'
museum rooms and furniture with the agility of sailors cleaning down a
man-of-war. There was not a speck of dust on the carved wood; not an
inch of brass but it glistened. The glasses over the pastels obscured
nothing of the work of Latour, Greuze, and Liotard (illustrious
painter of /The Chocolate Girl/), miracles of an art, alas! so
fugitive. The inimitable lustre of Florentine bronze took all the
varying hues of the light; the painted glass glowed with color. Every
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: of even a very elegant design; and there is no reason why
a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so
situated as to look comely from without. On the other
hand, there is a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring
fiasco like the fall of Lucifer. There are daring and
gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
being contemptible; and we know that 'fools rush in where
angels fear to tread.' But to aim at making a common-
place villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each
particular; to attempt the homeliest achievement, and to
attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
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