| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: lobster must be silly enough to stay among the rocks. Sometimes after
a high tide the mussels come in and I grab them."
"Well, taking one day with another, how much do you earn?"
"Oh, eleven or twelve sous. I could do with that if I were alone; but
I have got my old father to keep, and he can't do anything, the good
man, because he's blind."
At these words, said simply, Pauline and I looked at each other
without a word; then I asked,--
"Haven't you a wife, or some good friend?"
He cast upon us one of the most lamentable glances that I ever saw as
he answered,--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding
slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields,
tearing the trees up by their roots, burying gradually house,
church, and village, and making this place for a few thousand
years what it was many thousand years ago. Good-bye then, after a
very few winters, to bees, and butterflies, and singing-birds, and
flowers; and good-bye to all vegetables, and fruit, and bread;
good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes. You would have, if you
were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish and seals, if any
came near enough to be caught. You would have to live in a word,
if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic regions,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: fields of growing things, and working all about with
crude implements or with no implements at all other
than their bare hands were many of the brute-men en-
gaged in the first agriculture that I had seen within
Pellucidar.
They put me to work cultivating in a patch of melons.
I never was a farmer nor particularly keen for this sort
of work, and I am free to confess that time never had
dragged so heavily as it did during the hour or the year
I spent there at that work. How long it really was I do
not know, of course; but it was all too long.
Pellucidar |
