| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: One thing I saw, I had been ass enough to give him warning, and
that which I meant to do I must do at once.
You would think I had had about enough excitement for one morning,
but there was another turn waiting me. As soon as I got far enough
round the cape to see my house I made out there were strangers
there; a little farther, and no doubt about it. There was a couple
of armed sentinels squatting at my door. I could only suppose the
trouble about Uma must have come to a head, and the station been
seized. For aught I could think, Uma was taken up already, and
these armed men were waiting to do the like with me.
However, as I came nearer, which I did at top speed, I saw there
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: suitable junctures it nodded or shook its head. Neither did it
lack words proper for the occasion: "Really! Indeed! Pray tell
me! Is it possible! Upon my word! By no means! Oh! Ah! Hem!" and
other such weighty utterances as imply attention, inquiry,
acquiescence, or dissent on the part of the auditor. Even had you
stood by and seen the scarecrow made, you could scarcely have
resisted the conviction that it perfectly understood the cunning
counsels which the old witch poured into its counterfeit of an
ear. The more earnestly it applied its lips to the pipe, the more
distinctly was its human likeness stamped among visible
realities, the more sagacious grew its expression, the more
 Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863
on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
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Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
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