| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: 'I hope to God,' he said, - and I trust the prayer was answered, -
'that I shall never be uncivil to a pedlar.' Was this the
imperturbable CIGARETTE? This, this was he. O change beyond
report, thought, or belief!
Meantime the heaven wept upon our heads; and the windows grew
brighter as the night increased in darkness. We trudged in and out
of La Fere streets; we saw shops, and private houses where people
were copiously dining; we saw stables where carters' nags had
plenty of fodder and clean straw; we saw no end of reservists, who
were very sorry for themselves this wet night, I doubt not, and
yearned for their country homes; but had they not each man his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: experience, all that is meant by the perfect union of two beings, will
understand Gaston de Nueil's suicide perfectly well. A woman does not
bend and form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The
pleasure of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful
ingenuity of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to each,
can discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and
delicate delights for which we are steeped in a thousand
superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that
lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to
another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or
excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: drive us in. And, finally, I am going to try the experiment of
putting the Outlaw in the lead and relegating Prince to his old
position in the near wheel. I won't need any pebbles then.
NOTHING THAT EVER CAME TO ANYTHING
It was at Quito, the mountain capital of Ecuador, that the
following passage at correspondence took place. Having occasion
to buy a pair of shoes in a shop six feet by eight in size and
with walls three feet thick, I noticed a mangy leopard skin on the
floor. I had no Spanish. The shop-keeper had no English. But I
was an adept at sign language. I wanted to know where I should go
to buy leopard skins. On my scribble-pad I drew the interesting
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