| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: "'GO, AND REFORM--OR, MARK MY WORDS--SOME DAY, FOR YOUR SINS YOU
WILL DIE AND GO TO HELL OR HADLEYBURG--TRY AND MAKE IT THE FORMER.'"
A ghastly silence followed. First an angry cloud began to settle
darkly upon the faces of the citizenship; after a pause the cloud
began to rise, and a tickled expression tried to take its place;
tried so hard that it was only kept under with great and painful
difficulty; the reporters, the Brixtonites, and other strangers bent
their heads down and shielded their faces with their hands, and
managed to hold in by main strength and heroic courtesy. At this
most inopportune time burst upon the stillness the roar of a
solitary voice--Jack Halliday's:
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Daisy Miller by Henry James: In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty
to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring
conditions; but here at Vevey, what conditions could be better than these?--
a pretty American girl coming and standing in front of you in a garden.
This pretty American girl, however, on hearing Winterbourne's observation,
simply glanced at him; she then turned her head and looked over the parapet,
at the lake and the opposite mountains. He wondered whether he had gone
too far, but he decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat.
While he was thinking of something else to say, the young lady turned
to the little boy again.
"I should like to know where you got that pole," she said.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: third, more cunning and skillful than his fellows, have flown under the shady
trees, for all the trail he left. But redmen followed the same methods of
woodcraft from tradition, as Wetzel had learned after long years of study and
experience.
And now, satisfied that he had divined the Delaware's intention, he slipped
down the bank of the ravine, and once more broke into a run. He leaped
lightly, sure-footed as a goat, from stone to stone, over fallen logs, and the
brawling brook. At every turn of the ravine, at every open place, he stopped
to listen.
Arriving on the other side of the ridge, he left the ravine and passed along
the edge of the rising ground. He listened to the birds, and searched the
The Spirit of the Border |
