| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter;
run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I
choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of
myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a
secret, underlying sympathy between that story and this day with
its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps simply for the
reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There
were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby
& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their
cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was
rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: noticed him taking off his coat. Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby
jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front with the white tie
under his dark shaved chin. He had a strange air of insolence - or
so it seemed to me. I addressed him much louder than I intended
really.
"Did you know that extraordinary man?"
"To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished or
very lucky. Mr. Mills here . . ."
"Yes, I have been lucky," Mills struck in. "It was my cousin who
was distinguished. That's how I managed to enter his house in
Paris - it was called the Pavilion - twice."
The Arrow of Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: setting sun a cluster of tall peaks rose from the sea; and they,
unless his reckonings were wrong, were the mountains of Macanao, at
the western end of Margarita, the Isle of Pearls, then famous in
all the cities of the Mediterranean, and at the great German fairs,
and second only in richness to that pearl island in the gulf of
Panama, which fifteen years before had cost John Oxenham his life.
The next day saw them running along the north side of the island,
having passed undiscovered (as far as they could see) the castle
which the Spaniards had built at the eastern end for the protection
of the pearl fisheries.
At last they opened a deep and still bight, wooded to the water's
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