| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: The lieutenant felt the difficulty, and owned himself unprepared to give at
once an adequate solution; nevertheless, he declined to renounce his theory.
He asserted that the arguments in favor of it carried conviction to his mind,
and that he entertained no doubt but that, in the course of time,
all apparently antagonistic circumstances would be explained so as to become
consistent with the view he took. He was careful, however, to make it
understood that with respect to the original cause of the disruption
he had no theory to offer; and although he knew what expansion
might be the result of subterranean forces, he did not venture to say
that he considered it sufficient to produce so tremendous an effect.
The origin of the catastrophe was a problem still to be solved.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: and set up on legs for benches, and holes cut out in the logs and
the space filled in with squares of greased paper for
window-panes. The main light came in through the open door. Very
often Webster's "Elementary Spelling-book" was the only
text-book. This was the kind of school most common in the middle
West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood, though already in some places
there were schools of a more pretentious character. Indeed, back
in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a child of six, was
learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a year
older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county.
It is doubtful if they ever met, but the destinies of the two
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: Pierrotin himself sat on an almost invisible seat perched just below
the sashes of the coupe.
The master of the establishment paid the tax which was levied upon all
public conveyances on his coucou only, which was rated to carry six
persons; and he took out a special permit each time that he drove the
four-wheeler. This may seem extraordinary in these days, but when the
tax on vehicles was first imposed, it was done very timidly, and such
deceptions were easily practised by the coach proprietors, always
pleased to "faire la queue" (cheat of their dues) the government
officials, to use the argot of their vocabulary. Gradually the greedy
Treasury became severe; it forced all public conveyances not to roll
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