| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: dead - or dying man?"
With these words he looked carefully around the room, but there
was no more blood to be seen anywhere. Any spot would have been
clearly visible on the light-coloured floor. There was nothing
else to tell of the horrible crime that had been committed here,
nothing but the great, hideous, brown-red spot in the middle of
the room.
"Have you made a thorough search for the body?" asked the doctor.
The magistrate shook his head. "No, I have done nothing to speak
of yet. We have been waiting for you. There is a gendarme at the
gate; no one can go in or out without being seen."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for
the term of her natural life! Would they be for resuscitating
their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences
to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and
fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does
humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making
progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men's shoes as a
step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable
professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are
people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over
it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: eight, in the year 1621. He reached Goa, as his book tells, in
1622, and was in 1624, at the age of thirty-one, told off as one of
the missionaries to be employed in the conversion of the
Abyssinians. They were to be converted, from a form of Christianity
peculiar to themselves, to orthodox Catholicism. The Abyssinian
Emperor Segued was protector of the enterprise, of which we have
here the story told.
Father Lobo was nine years in Abyssinia, from the age of thirty-one
to the age of forty, and this was the adventurous time of his life.
The death of the Emperor Segued put an end to the protection that
had given the devoted missionaries, in the midst of dangers, a
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