| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: have the makings of a man. I think I must be FEY to-day; you
cannot irritate me even when you try. Do you know," he continued
softly, "I think we are the two most miserable men in England, you
and I? we have got on to thirty without wife or child, or so much
as a shop to look after - poor, pitiful, lost devils, both! And
now we clash about a girl! As if there were not several millions
in the United Kingdom! Ah, Frank, Frank, the one who loses this
throw, be it you or me, he has my pity! It were better for him -
how does the Bible say? - that a millstone were hanged about his
neck and he were cast into the depth of the sea. Let us take a
drink," he concluded suddenly, but without any levity of tone.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: them slay an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest
provocation, and straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying,
shooting and shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as
we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a
white face. In the committee room of a local council or city
corporation, the humblest employees of the committee find defenders if
they complain of harsh treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences
and holidays are pleaded for, delinquencies are excused in the most
sentimental manner provided only the employee, however patent a
hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hat in hand. But let the most
obvious measure of justice be demanded by the secretary of a Trade
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: the village received us with a torchlight procession and
speeches, and everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it
made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had
always been hankering to be.
For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made
much of him, and he tilted up his nose and stepped
around the town as though he owned it. Some called
him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled
him up fit to bust. You see he laid over me and Jim
considerable, because we only went down the river on
a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went
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