| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: Slavery had inured me to hardships that made ordinary trouble sit
lightly upon me. Could I have worked at my trade I could have
earned two dollars a day, but as a common laborer I received but
one dollar. The difference was of great importance to me, but if
I could not get two dollars, I was glad to get one; and so I went
to work for Mr. French as a common laborer. The consciousness
that I was free--no longer a slave--kept me cheerful under this,
and many similar proscriptions, which I was destined to meet in
New Bedford and elsewhere on the free soil of Massachusetts.
For instance, though colored children attended the schools,
and were treated kindly by their teachers, the New Bedford Lyceum
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: and how a dumb drawing on a rock was counted a sufficient
sentry over the avenues of freedom. Where your father
failed, will you be wiser or more fortunate? or are you, too,
helpless in the toils?'
I had followed his words with changing emotion, but now I
believed I understood.
'I see,' I cried; 'you judge me rightly. I must follow where
my parents led; and oh! I am not only willing, I am eager!'
'No,' replied the doctor, 'not death for you. The flawed
vessel we may break, but not the perfect. No, your mother
cherished a different hope, and so do I. I see,' he cried,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: at them now, for he felt somehow that they were strange, and ugly,
and wrong, and horrible. And it all began to come back to him.
They were men; and they were fighting; savage, desperate, up-and-
down fighting, such as Tom had seen too many times before.
And he stopped his little ears, and longed to swim away; and was
very glad that he was a water-baby, and had nothing to do any more
with horrid dirty men, with foul clothes on their backs, and foul
words on their lips; but he dared not stir out of his hole: while
the rock shook over his head with the trampling and struggling of
the keepers and the poachers.
All of a sudden there was a tremendous splash, and a frightful
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