| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but
of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place that
seemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and
its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this
town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps
had been deserted overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a
deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led me at last to the
only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass
the winter alone in this empty theatre. The place was "The Pacific
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: cried, gladly, and rising, she ran to the door.
She saw a big bay horse bearing a burly rider. He discovered her at the
same instant, and pulled his horse.
"Ho! Ho! if it ain't Pretty Eyes!" he called out, in gay, coarse voice.
Carley recognized the voice, and then the epithet, before her sight
established the man as Haze Ruff. A singular stultifying shock passed over
her.
"Wal, by all thet's lucky!" he said, dismounting. "I knowed we'd meet some
day. I can't say I just laid fer you, but I kept my eyes open."
Manifestly he knew she was alone, for he did not glance into the cabin.
"I'm waiting for--Glenn," she said, with lips she tried to make stiff.
The Call of the Canyon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: anguish of appearing before his creditors,--a terrible scene which the
law renders inevitable, and to which, indeed, he might succumb. On
this point the law is precise, formal, and not to be evaded. The
merchant who refused to appear would, for that act alone, be brought
before the criminal police courts. But though the law compels the
bankrupt to appear, it has no power to oblige the creditor to do so. A
meeting of creditors is a ceremony of no real importance except in
special cases,--when, for instance, a swindler is to be dispossessed
and a coalition among the creditors agreed upon, when there is
difference of opinion between the privileged creditors and the
unsecured creditors, or when the /concordat/ is specially dishonest,
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
