| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: and meddlesome Citizen Genet, envoy of the French Republic, and how
Washington requested his recall? Or the French privateers that a little
later, about 1797-98, preyed upon our commerce? And the hatred of France
which many Americans felt and expressed at that time? How many remember
that the King of France, directly our Revolution was over, was more
hostile to us than England?
Chapter X: Jackstraws
Jackstraws is a game which most of us have played in our youth. You empty
on a table a box of miniature toy rakes, shovels, picks, axes, all sorts
of tools and implements. These lie under each other and above each other
in intricate confusion, not unlike cross timber in a western forest, only
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: year old, and what I didn't know about Injins and Agency cattle
wasn't a patch of alkali. I had a kid outfit of h'ar bridle,
lots of silver and such, and I used to ride over and be the
handsome boy before such outfits as happened along.
They were queer people, most of 'em from Missoury and
such-like southern seaports, and they were tur'ble sick of
travel by the time they come in sight of Emigrant Pass. Up to
Santa Fe they mostly hiked along any old way, but once there they
herded up together in bunches of twenty wagons or so, 'count of
our old friends, Geronimo and Loco. A good many of 'em had
horned cattle to their wagons, and they crawled along about two
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then
upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found
the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young
gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line,
to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private
individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a
man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of
demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth,
as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on
railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger;
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