| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: the value of the sauce in lessons in chicanery."
"Very well," said Desroches. "Suppose that a man owes you money, and
your creditors serve a writ of attachment upon him; there is nothing
to prevent all your other creditors from doing the same thing. And now
what does the court do when all the creditors make application for
orders to pay? /The court divides the whole sum attached,
proportionately among them all./ That division, made under the eye of
a magistrate, is what we call a /contribution/. If you owe ten
thousand francs, and your creditors issue writs of attachment on a
debt due to you of a thousand francs, each one of them gets so much
per cent, 'so much in the pound,' in legal phrase; so much (that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: capacious boiler.
The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided
chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or
actual countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments;
a carpenter's bench; and a spared corner for photography, while at
the far end a space is kept clear for playing soldiers. Two boxes
contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and foot; two
others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-rules and
the three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or, after a
day's play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or white for the
two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or not for the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: betters.
The cellars were copied from the caves of Elephanta.
The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton.
And the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth.
So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a
thorough Naboth's vineyard to critics, and architects, and all
persons who like meddling with other men's business, and spending
other men's money. So they were all setting upon poor Sir John,
year after year, and trying to talk him into spending a hundred
thousand pounds or so, in building, to please them and not himself.
But he always put them off, like a canny North-countryman as he
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