| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: that can't speak English. How is that?"
"Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
American corner of heaven you choose to go to. I have shot along,
a whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles,
through perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single
white one, or hearing a word I could understand. You see, America
was occupied a billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and
that sort of folks, before a white man ever set his foot in it.
During the first three hundred years after Columbus's discovery,
there wasn't ever more than one good lecture audience of white
people, all put together, in America - I mean the whole thing,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: glance with which these sovereigns of the earth make you measure the
distance that lies between you and them disappeared. I knew almost
nothing of my family. The duchess told me that my great-uncle, an old
abbe whose very name I did not know, was to be member of the privy
council, that my brother was already promoted, and also that by a
provision of the Charter, of which I had not yet heard, my father
became once more Marquis de Vandenesse.
"I am but one thing, the serf of Clochegourde," I said in a low voice
to the countess.
The transformation scene of the Restoration was carried through with a
rapidity which bewildered the generation brought up under the imperial
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: or planters from the Teche country,--forming one of the numerous
expeditions organized for the purpose of finding the bodies of
relatives or friends lost in the great hurricane, and of
punishing the robbers of the dead. They had searched numberless
nooks of the coast, had given sepulture to many corpses, had
recovered a large amount of jewelry, and--as Feliu afterward
learned,--had summarily tried and executed several of the most
abandoned class of wreckers found with ill-gotten valuables in
their possession, and convicted of having mutilated the drowned.
But they came to Viosca's landing only to obtain information;--he
was too well known and liked to be a subject for suspicion; and,
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