| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: how long a time elapsed ere he found himself in the by-road
near the lodge of Ravelston, propped against the wall, his
lungs heaving like bellows, his legs leaden-heavy, his mind
possessed by one sole desire - to lie down and be unseen. He
remembered the thick coverts round the quarry-hole pond, an
untrodden corner of the world where he might surely find
concealment till the night should fall. Thither he passed
down the lane; and when he came there, behold! he had
forgotten the frost, and the pond was alive with young people
skating, and the pond-side coverts were thick with lookers-
on. He looked on a while himself. There was one tall,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is
entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus,
though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of the
rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The fiction
of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained, and is in
the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which puts into her
mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event occurring forty
years after the date of the supposed oration. But Plato, like Shakespeare,
is careless of such anachronisms, which are not supposed to strike the mind
of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on
Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: was short and easy and needed no payment, whereupon he
put up the coin and regarded me out of his fine blue eyes.
He was quite fair, a young man still, and dressed after a
manner of his own in garments not at all new but with
a beauty of fashioning and putting on. He and his mule
looked a corner out of a great painting. And I had no
sooner thought that than he said, ``I see in you, friend, a
face and figure for my `Draught of Fishes.' And by Saint
Christopher, there is water over yonder and just the landscape!''
He leaned from the saddle and spoke persuasively,
``Come from the road a bit down to the water and let me
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