| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: inspiring confidence and banishing uncertainty, a strong,
well-balanced, broad-minded, self-abnegating chief executive,
and she proposed to furnish one. Whether she would succeed or not
must be left to the future to reveal, but the one great task set
by destiny for her to accomplish was to prepare the mind of a
worthy successor to meet openly and intelligently the problems
which had been too vast, too new and too complicated for her
predecessors, if not for herself, to solve.
When her son was seventeen years old he was married to Alute, a
young Manchu lady of one of the best families in Peking and was
nominally given the reins of power, though as a matter of fact
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: the children, who were always with her, looked up at their mother, or
asked one of the incessant idle questions which convey so much to a
mother's ears, then the smile brightened, and expressed the joys of a
mother's love. Her gait was slow and dignified. Her dress never
varied; evidently she had made up her mind to think no more of her
toilette, and to forget a world by which she meant no doubt to be
forgotten. She wore a long, black gown, confined at the waist by a
watered-silk ribbon, and by way of scarf a lawn handkerchief with a
broad hem, the two ends passed carelessly through her waistband. The
instinct of dress showed itself in that she was daintily shod, and
gray silk stockings carried out the suggestion of mourning in this
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa: lodge. Close behind him some one followed. The badger turned to
look over his shoulder and to his great joy he beheld a Dakota
brave in handsome buckskins. In his hand he carried a magic arrow.
Across his back dangled a long fringed quiver. In answer to the
badger's prayer, the avenger had sprung from out the red globules.
"My son!" exclaimed the badger with extended right hand.
"How, father," replied the brave; "I am your avenger!"
Immediately the badger told the sad story of his hungry little
ones and the stingy bear.
Listening closely the young man stood looking steadily upon
the ground.
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