| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: [BOOTS AND SADDLES]
and the bands could hardly hold in for the final note; then they
turned their whole strength loose on "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys
are marching," and everybody's excitement rose to blood-heat.
Now an impressive pause - then the bugle sang "TAPS" -
translatable, this time, into "Good-bye, and God keep us all!" for
taps is the soldier's nightly release from duty, and farewell:
plaintive, sweet, pathetic, for the morning is never sure, for him;
always it is possible that he is hearing it for the last time. . .
.
[TAPS]
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed,
And hang thee o'er my tomb when I am dead;
Ne'er shall this blood be wiped from thy point,
But thou shalt wear it as a herald's coat,
To emblaze the honour that thy master got.
CADE.
Iden, farewell; and be proud of thy victory. Tell Kent from
me, she hath lost her best man, and exhort all the world to be
cowards; for I, that never feared any, am vanquished by famine,
not by valour.
[Dies.]
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of
Saltram's mind. I expected next to hear she had been assured he
was awfully clever. I tried to tell her--I had it almost on my
conscience--what was the proper way to regard him; an effort
attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual
effect of my feeling that I wasn't after all very sure of it. She
had come to-night out of high curiosity--she had wanted to learn
this proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers and
hadn't understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt's, that her
curiosity had been kindled--kindled mainly by his wife's remarkable
stories of his want of virtue. "I suppose they ought to have kept
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