| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: risks.... As to the sea, my dear fellow, you must know that there we have
to lower the flag.... The English navy is, and long will be, too
dominant."
That was on April 17. On May 2, the Treaty of Cession was signed by the
exultant Livingston. Bonaparte, instead of establishing an outpost of
autocracy at New Orleans, sold to us not only the small piece of land
which we had originally in mind, but the huge piece of land whose
dimensions I have given above. We paid him fifteen millions for nearly a
million square miles. The formal transfer was made on December 17 of that
same year, 1803. There is my second jackstraw.
Thus, twenty years after the first time in 1783, Great Britain stood
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: collections reduced to cinders, but an immense stock of books removed from
Paternoster Row by the Stationers for safety was burnt to ashes in the vaults
of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Coming nearer to our own day, how thankful we ought to be for
the preservation of the Cotton Library. Great was the consternation
in the literary world of 1731 when they heard of the fire at
Ashburnham House, Westminster, where, at that time, the Cotton MSS.
were deposited. By great exertions the fire was conquered, but not
before many MSS. had been quite destroyed and many others injured.
Much skill was shown in the partial restoration of these books,
charred almost beyond recognition; they were carefully separated
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: opportunities for bathing and adultery, but who were reverently
if confusedly aware that they were in the presence of something
unique and ineffable, and determined to make the utmost of their
privilege.
"After all," he said to himself one evening, as his eyes
wandered, with somewhat of a convalescent's simple joy, from one
to another of their large confiding faces, "after all, they've
got a religion ...." The phrase struck him, in the moment of
using it, as indicating a new element in his own state of mind,
and as being, in fact, the key to his new feeling about the
Hickses. Their muddled ardour for great things was related to
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