| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: the rope ladder, which they ascended, and performed the tricks
expected of them. These were going through a pagoda, drawing
water, creeping through a tube, wearing a criminal's collar,
turning a tread-mill, or working some other equally simple trick.
At times the mice had to be directed by a small stick in the
hands of the manager, but they were carefully trained, kindly
treated, and much appreciated by the children.
Although less attractive, there is no other show which impresses
itself so forcibly on the child's mind as the monkey, dog and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: and an inch-long smear proved the tomb of all my hopes,
while the great bibliographer, wiping his thumb on his coat sleeve,
passed on with the remark, "Oh, yes! they have black heads sometimes."
That was something to know--another fact for the entomologist;
for my little gentleman had a hard, shiny, white head,
and I never heard of a black-headed bookworm before or since.
Perhaps the great abundance of black-letter books in the Bodleian
may account for the variety. At any rate he was an Anobium.
I have been unmercifully "chaffed" for the absurd idea that a paper-eating
worm could be kept a prisoner in a paper box. Oh, these critics!
Your bookworm is a shy, lazy beast, and takes a day or two to recover
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which has lately been
published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand species, and
that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of
entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species
of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to
all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to
every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may
be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus
flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after
roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and
those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of
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