| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: addressing the figure by the kaimyo [2] of O-Sono, said: -- "I have come
here in order to help you. Perhaps in that tansu there is something about
which you have reason to feel anxious. Shall I try to find it for you?" The
shadow appeared to give assent by a slight motion of the head; and the
priest, rising, opened the top drawer. It was empty. Successively he opened
the second, the third, and the fourth drawer; -- he searched carefully
behind them and beneath them;-- he carefully examined the interior of the
chest. He found nothing. But the figure remained gazing as wistfully as
before. "What can she want?" thought the priest. Suddenly it occurred to
him that there might be something hidden under the paper with which the
drawers were lined. He removed the lining of the first drawer:-- nothing!
Kwaidan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject,
the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the
wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he
has all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows
the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a
brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly
to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual
pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the
best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that
we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: "What is the connection between the naked back of a certain boy with a
greatcoat on and a salt-pot under his arm, and the tip of a horsewhip?
Answer: No connection at present, but there will be soon."
Bonaparte was so pleased with this sally of his wit that he chuckled a
little and went to lie down on his bed.
There was bread-baking that afternoon, and there was a fire lighted in the
brick oven behind the house, and Tant Sannie had left the great wooden-
elbowed chair in which she passed her life, and waddled out to look at it.
Not far off was Waldo, who, having thrown a pail of food into the pigsty,
now leaned over the sod wall looking at the pigs. Half of the sty was dry,
but the lower half was a pool of mud, on the edge of which the mother sow
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