| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: weighing each about twenty-two pounds, may be purchased for a crown.
Besides the particular charge I had of the house of Fremona, I was
appointed the patriarch's grand-vicar through the whole kingdom of
Tigre. I thought that to discharge this office as I ought, it was
incumbent on me to provide necessaries as well for the bodies as the
souls of the converted Catholics. This labour was much increased by
the famine which the grasshoppers had brought that year upon the
country. Our house was perpetually surrounded by some of those
unhappy people, whom want had compelled to abandon their
habitations, and whose pale cheeks and meagre bodies were undeniable
proofs of their misery and distress. All the relief I could
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: her? I must leave her behind. Yes, I could make up my mind to it;
but--I know myself--I should be ass enough to go back to her. Still,
nobody knows Aquilina. Shall I take her or leave her?"
"You will not take her!" cried a voice that filled Castanier with
sickening dread. He turned sharply, and saw the Englishman.
"The devil is in it!" cried the cashier aloud.
Melmoth had passed his victim by this time; and if Castanier's first
impulse had been to fasten a quarrel on a man who read his own
thoughts, he was so much torn up by opposing feelings that the
immediate result was a temporary paralysis. When he resumed his walk
he fell once more into that fever of irresolution which besets those
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: stay there for him, if he thought fit to leave Utica, or to come
to his aid with his troops, if he were besieged. Scipio was on
shipboard, near a certain promontory, not far from Utica,
expecting an answer upon the same account. But Cato thought fit
to retain the messengers, till the three hundred should come to
some resolution,
As for the senators that were there, they showed great
forwardness, and at once set free their slaves, and furnished
them with arms. But the three hundred being men occupied in
merchandise and money-lending, much of their substance also
consisting in slaves, the enthusiasm that Cato's speech had
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