| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: your railroad, and your balloon? Laws, they don't
amount to shucks 'longside of a flea. A flea is just
a comet b'iled down small."
Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim
said:
"Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin' en
no lies, Mars Tom?"
"Yes, they are; they're perfectly true."
"Well, den, honey, a body's got to respec' a flea.
I ain't had no respec' for um befo', sca'sely, but dey
ain't no gittin' roun' it, dey do deserve it, dat's
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: products purify the atmosphere. The house, which backed up against
another fronting on the rue de Seine, was necessarily shallow, and the
staircase wound round upon itself. The third floor was the last. Three
windows to three rooms, namely, a dining-room, a small salon, and a
chamber on one side of the landing; on the other, a little kitchen,
and two single rooms; above, an immense garret without partitions.
Madame Bridau chose this lodging for three reasons: economy, for it
cost only four hundred francs a year, so that she took a lease of it
for nine years; proximity to her sons' school, the Imperial Lyceum
being at a short distance; thirdly, because it was in the quarter to
which she was used.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: bishop of Leon--How came priests and bishops, an' please your honour, to
trouble their heads so much about gun-powder? God knows, said my uncle
Toby--his providence brings good out of every thing--and he avers, in his
chronicle of King Alphonsus, who reduced Toledo, That in the year 1343,
which was full thirty-seven years before that time, the secret of powder
was well known, and employed with success, both by Moors and Christians,
not only in their sea-combats, at that period, but in many of their most
memorable sieges in Spain and Barbary--And all the world knows, that Friar
Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and had generously given the world a
receipt to make it by, above a hundred and fifty years before even Schwartz
was born--And that the Chinese, added my uncle Toby, embarrass us, and all
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