| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: at once he bought another in the place of what he sold, and in every
case an untilled farm, in order to gratify his love for owrk.
As you describe him (I proceeded), your father must truly have been
formed by nature with a passion for husbandry, not unlike that corn-
hunger which merchants suffer from. You know their habits: by reason
of this craving after corn,[39] whenever they hear that corn is to be
got, they go sailing off to find it, even if they must cross the
Aegean, or the Euxine, or the Sicilian seas. And when they have got as
much as ever they can get, they will not let it out of their sight,
but store it in the vessel on which they sail themselves, and off they
go across the seas again.[40] Whenever they stand in need of money,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: wasted many fortunes. The beautiful Diane is one of those spendthrifts
who don't cost a penny, but for whom a man spends millions. Give
yourself up to her, body and soul, if you choose; but keep your money
in your hand, like the old fellow in Girodet's 'Deluge.'"
From the tenor of these remarks it was to be inferred that the
princess had the depth of a precipice, the grace of a queen, the
corruption of diplomatists, the mystery of a first initiation, and the
dangerous qualities of a siren. The two clever men of the world,
incapable of foreseeing the denouement of their joke, succeeded in
presenting Diane d'Uxelles as a consummate specimen of the Parisian
woman, the cleverest of coquettes, the most enchanting mistress in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: they find that living up there above the world, in their
peaceful nest, is pleasanter than living down in the
troublous world. The seven hundred inhabitants are all
blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin
to each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply
one large family, and they like the home folks better than
they like strangers, hence they persistently stay at home.
It has been said that for ages Dilsberg has been merely
a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots there,
but the captain said, "Because of late years the government
has taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres;
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