| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: and it was of no further use. "Well, Harry," cried his father,
"do you want us all to break our necks on the way back to the cottage?"
Harry did not answer. He wondered if he ought to suspect
the hand of a mysterious being in this last accident?
Could there possibly exist in these depths an enemy whose
unaccountable antagonism would one day create serious difficulties?
Had someone an interest in defending the new coal field against
any attempt at working it? In truth that seemed absurd,
yet the facts spoke for themselves, and they accumulated in such
a way as to change simple presumptions into certainties.
In the meantime the explorers' situation was bad enough.
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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: should have used the telephone for the first time in my
civilized career. So it goes in these young countries;
telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the
grizzly bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs
Hotel, with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley
is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here
and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the
barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one
of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel - is or was; for since
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: intellectual labour and government of her age she took small part, and was
fit to take none. There were not wanting writers and thinkers who saw
clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who
were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman
writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and
kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be
singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels,
reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation of baths and theatres, all
things go downward and the state decays." Yet neither he nor that large
body of writers and thinkers who saw the condition towards which the
parasitism of woman was tending to reduce society, preached any adequate
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