| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: Show me anything cheaper. Why am I doing it?
There's little profit in this game. Falk wouldn't
look at it. I do it for the sake of a lot of young
white fellows here that hadn't a place where they
could get a decent meal and eat it decently in good
company. There's first-rate company always at
my table."
The convinced way he surveyed the empty chairs
made me feel as if I had intruded upon a tiffin of
ghostly Presences.
"A white man should eat like a white man, dash
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: of the fire without the unendurable smoke. Cooking in the rain has
its disadvantages. But how good the supper tastes when it is served
up on a tin plate, with an empty box for a table and a roll of
blankets at the foot of the bed for a seat!
A day, two days, three days, the storm may continue, according to
your luck. I have been out in the woods for a fortnight without a
drop of rain or a sign of dust. Again, I have tented on the shore
of a big lake for a week, waiting for an obstinate tempest to pass
by.
Look now, just at nightfall: is there not a little lifting and
breaking of the clouds in the west, a little shifting of the wind
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: five hundred yards, heads were to be seen popping up and down in a
fort of Tamesese's. On both sides the same enthusiasm without
council, the same senseless vigilance, reigned. Some took aim;
some blazed before them at a venture. Now - when a head showed on
the other side - one would take a crack at it, remarking that it
would never do to "miss a chance." Now they would all fire a
volley and bob down; a return volley rang across the ravine, and
was punctually answered: harmless as lawn-tennis. The whites
expostulated in vain. The warriors, drunken with noise, made
answer by a fresh general discharge and bade their visitors run
while it was time. Upon their return to headquarters, men were
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