| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: --
"Oh!" said the other, "I did not know yours was a six-days' cab;
but of course it would be very easy to alter your license.
I would see that you did not lose by it; the fact is,
Mrs. Briggs very much prefers you to drive her."
"I should be glad to oblige the lady, sir, but I had
a seven-days' license once, and the work was too hard for me,
and too hard for my horses. Year in and year out, not a day's rest,
and never a Sunday with my wife and children; and never able to go
to a place of worship, which I had always been used to do before I took
to the driving box. So for the last five years I have only taken
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a light foot,
carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up
the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
transacted. Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about
the floor. There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had
left her keys in Calistoga. There was the stove, but, alas!
our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the
plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce
solved.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he
had already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London, very
little later, drove him straight before it--drove him one Sunday
afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He
marched in other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him
to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed
since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry
for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back. I don't
mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I
mean that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as
the event was to show, couldn't have been bettered as a means of
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