| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a
treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken
reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running
sore, the administration. (5)
"When this method fails, they have two others more effectual,
which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First,
they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings.
Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; L, a fleet
at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet
in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of
a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: copper as they hoped.'"
"This turned out to be true. And I am not sure that the business man had
not known it all the while. 'We looked over the property pretty
thoroughly at the time of the Tamarack excitement,' he said. And in a few
days more, in fact, it was generally known that this land had returned to
its old state of not quite paying the taxes."
"Then I paid my visit to Mr. Beverly, but with no cowhide. 'Mr. Beverly,'
said I, 'I want to announce to you my engagement to Miss Ethel Lansing,
whose Michigan copper land you have lately acquired. I hope that you
bought some for your mother.'"
"Those," concluded Mr. Richard Field, "are the circumstances attending my
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features;
so drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to
express the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and
silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy for myself -
such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your
bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of
portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate,
and leaves the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of
truth. For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest
weapon of the enemy. The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe
you something, if your letter be the means of substituting once for
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