| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the
Gulf-shore,--the loftiest bit of land along fourteen miles of
just such marshy coast as I have spoken of. Landward, it
dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to look at, a
wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with ranges of
bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of
saw-grass, stretching away to a bluish-green line of woods that
closed the horizon, and imperfectly drained in the driest season
by a slimy little bayou that continually vomited foul water into
the sea. The point had been much discussed by geologists; it
proved a godsend to United States surveyors weary of attempting
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum: "No, sir; we didn't cause anything. It was the earthquake."
The man with the star stood for a time quietly thinking over this
speech. Then he asked:
"What is an earthquake?"
"I don't know," said Zeb, who was still confused. But Dorothy, seeing
his perplexity, answered:
"It's a shaking of the earth. In this quake a big crack opened and we
fell through--horse and buggy, and all--and the stones got loose and
came down with us."
The man with the star regarded her with his calm, expressionless eyes.
"The Rain of Stones has done much damage to our city," he said;
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: the sun is never too hot, and the frost is never too cold.
And what did he live on? Water-cresses, perhaps; or perhaps water-
gruel, and water-milk; too many land-babies do so likewise. But we
do not know what one-tenth of the water-things eat; so we are not
answerable for the water-babies.
Sometimes he went along the smooth gravel water-ways, looking at
the crickets which ran in and out among the stones, as rabbits do
on land; or he climbed over the ledges of rock, and saw the sand-
pipes hanging in thousands, with every one of them a pretty little
head and legs peeping out; or he went into a still corner, and
watched the caddises eating dead sticks as greedily as you would
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