| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: with his naked sword; the great beast caught itself and reared
upon its hind legs to reach forth and seize this presumptuous
mortal that dared question its right to the flesh it craved; and
then the man sprang to the opposite side of the deck. The banth
toppled sideways at the same instant that it attempted to spring;
a raking talon passed close to Gahan's head at the moment that
his sword lunged through the savage heart, and as the warrior
wrenched his blade from the carcass it slipped silently over the
side of the ship.
A glance below showed that the vessel was drifting in the
direction of the tower to which Gahan had seen the prisoner led.
The Chessmen of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: leave her all their money. Fritz is giving me the money we squandered
at Strasbourg five times over! He is putting a million francs in a
banking house, M. Graff the tailor is adding another five hundred
thousand francs, and Mlle. Emilie's father not only allows me to
incorporate her portion--two hundred and fifty thousand francs--with
the capital, but he himself will be a shareholder with as much again.
So the firm of Brunner, Schwab and Company will start with two
millions five hundred thousand francs. Fritz has just bought fifteen
hundred thousand francs' worth of shares in the Bank of France to
guarantee our account with them. That is not all Fritz's fortune. He
has his father's house property, supposed to be worth another million,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: some kind in the air, and if there is, we all know who is back of
it; S. Behrman, of course, but who's back of him? It's
Shelgrim."
Shelgrim! The name fell squarely in the midst of the
conversation, abrupt, grave, sombre, big with suggestion,
pregnant with huge associations. No one in the group who was not
familiar with it; no one, for that matter, in the county, the
State, the whole reach of the West, the entire Union, that did
not entertain convictions as to the man who carried it; a giant
figure in the end-of-the-century finance, a product of
circumstance, an inevitable result of conditions, characteristic,
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