| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were
nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this
accursed life; and there--somewhere lost to me--things were
happening--momentous, terrible things . . . I lived at nights--my
days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded,
far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of the book."
He thought.
"I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the
dream, but as to what I did in the daytime--no. I could not
tell--I do not remember. My memory--my memory has gone. The
business of life slips from me--"
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: rare thing in a Frenchman,--fancying he had said or done something
incongruous; but the riddle was immediately solved.
"Do you thing it would be judicious," said Emilio, "if we spoke our
mind in the presence of our masters?"
"You are in a land of slaves," said the Duchess, in a tone and with a
droop of the head which gave her at once the look for which the
physician had sought in vain. "Vendramin," she went on, speaking so
that only the stranger could hear her, "took to smoking opium, a
villainous idea suggested to him by an Englishman who, for other
reasons of his, craved an easy death--not death as men see it in the
form of a skeleton, but death draped with the frippery you in France
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they
are wisest. They are the magi.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
