| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: the empty case, and says, 'I win.' Then the elevated pessimist goes
down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty-
dollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don't know how much money
it was; it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.
"'I'll have this here case filled up with works,' says Shorty, 'and
throw you again for five hundred.'
"'I'm your company,' says the high man. 'I'll meet you at the Smoked
Dog Saloon an hour from now.'
"The little man hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a
jewelry store. The heartbroken person stoops over and takes a
telescopic view of my haberdashery.
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: him, and we relapsed again into silence.
This time I was the first to break it. "I suppose," I said,
drearily, "all those horrid people will have come by now."
"Horrid people," he repeated, with rather an uncertain laugh, and
through the darkness I saw his figure bend forward as he stretched
out his hand to caress my horse's neck. "Why, Evie, I thought you
were pining for gayety, and that it was, in fact, for the purpose
of meeting these 'horrid people' that you came here."
"Yes, I know," I said, wistfully; "but somehow the last week has
been so pleasant that I cannot believe that anything will ever be
quite so nice again."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of
that cursed Jezebel of England - that horrible monster
Jezebel of England; and after having predicted sudden
destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned women,
and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same
when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to vindicate the
liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish
themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical
flourish: "And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE
TRUMPET HATH ONCE BLOWN."
The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the
|
