| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: But a sheepman is a hardy animal. Dry Valley Johnson had weathered too
many northers to turn his back on a late summer, spiritual or real.
Old? He would show them.
By the next mail went an order to San Antonio for an outfit of the
latest clothes, colours and styles and prices no object. The next day
went the recipe for the hair restorer clipped from a newspaper; for
Dry Valley's sunburned auburn hair was beginning to turn silvery above
his ears.
Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies
after youthful strawberry snatchers. Then, a few days later, he
suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: A waiter buzzed around it like a bee, and silver and
glass shone upon it. And, preliminary to the meal,
as the prehistoric granite strata heralded the pro-
tozoa, the bread of Gaul, compounded after the for-
mula of the recipe for the eternal bills, was there set
forth to the hand and tooth of a long-suffering city,
while the gods lay beside their nectar and home-made
biscuits and smiled, and the dentists leaped for joy
in their gold-leafy dens.
The eye of Binkley fixed a young man at his table
with the Bobemian gleam, which is a compound of
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of
persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had a
feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a
Scotch accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his
type. He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a
gossip in a cafe.
He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and
bigger. He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that
any decent people might occupy, like that vague room that is the
background of so many good portraits, a great blue-coated figure
with a soft voice and rather tired eyes, explaining very simply
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