| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: word sickened him; then he grappled with it. Sitting there on
a broken cart-wheel, the fading day, the noisy groups, the
church-bells' tolling passed before him like a panorama, while
the sharp struggle went on within. This money! He took it out,
and looked at it. If he gave it back, what then? He was going
to be cool about it.
People going by to church saw only a sickly mill-boy watching
them quietly at the alley's mouth. They did not know that he
was mad, or they would not have gone by so quietly: mad with
hunger; stretching out his hands to the world, that had given so
much to them, for leave to live the life God meant him to live.
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry
over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put
her lips to a glass of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her
grandfather when ill. The taste had left a sort of magic influence in
the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with
which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to
carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to
bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so
dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose
imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent
when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: he enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known
at the time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen
occasions at first some slight confusion among his acquaintance.
This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the
maid to the matron, and intercourse would soon proceed smoothly
again if people would only rest content with one such domestic
migration. But they do not. The fatal facility of the process
tempts them to repeat it. The result is bewildering: a people as
nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers
were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt
him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
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