| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: "I hurried to the window and across the street I saw a policeman
standing under a lamp-post. It took but a minute to call him. The
policeman opened the closet door, put handcuffs on Mr. Turnbull and
took him away."
Coroner Penfield, as well as the jurors, followed her statement
with absorbed attention. At its end he threw down his pencil and
spoke briefly to the deputy coroner, who had been busily engaged in
taking notes of the inquest, and then he turned to Helen.
"You heard no sound before entering the library?"
"No one walking about the house?" he persisted.
"No." She followed the negative with a short explanation. "I lay
 The Red Seal |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way
it came to pass that those scattered linen-weavers--emigrants from
the town into the country--were to the last regarded as aliens by
their rustic neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits
which belong to a state of loneliness.
In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas
Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among
the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from
the edge of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound of Silas's
loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the
winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a
 Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: existence, but that, in the one case, the power of the attraction to
produce motion has been diminished by the shortening of the distance
between the attracting bodies, and that in the other case the power
of producing motion has been augmented by the increase of the
distance. These remarks apply to all bodies, whether they be
sensible masses or molecules.
Of the inner quality that enables matter to attract matter we know
nothing; and the law of conservation makes no statement regarding
that quality. It takes the facts of attraction as they stand, and
affirms only the constancy of working-power. That power may exist
in the form of MOTION; or it may exist in the form of FORCE, with
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