| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: tracks. By the time we had set down and pried up our plates with a
knife from the red oil-cloth, along intrudes Widow Jessup with the hot
biscuit and the fried liver.
"Now, there was a woman that would have tempted an anchovy to forget
his vows. She was not so small as she was large; and a kind of welcome
air seemed to mitigate her vicinity. The pink of her face was the /in
hoc signo/ of a culinary temper and a warm disposition, and her smile
would have brought out the dogwood blossoms in December.
"Widow Jessup talks to us a lot of garrulousness about the climate and
history and Tennyson and prunes and the scarcity of mutton, and
finally wants to know where we came from.
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: since the auld riding days!"
"Very true, billies, and my blood was e'en boiling at it; but the
sight o' Grace Armstrong has settled it brawly."
"But the stocking, Hobbie'" said John Elliot; "we're utterly
ruined. Harry and I hae been to gather what was on the outby
land, and there's scarce a cloot left. I kenna how we're to
carry on--We maun a' gang to the wars, I think. Westburnflat
hasna the means, e'en if he had the will, to make up our loss;
there's nae mends to be got out o' him, but what ye take out o'
his banes. He hasna a four-footed creature but the vicious blood
thing he rides on, and that's sair trash'd wi' his night wark.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: the very garments turned out commonplace, and would not drape
themselves to any unaccustomed posture of the body. And he felt and
saw this all himself.
"But had I really any talent?" he said at length: "did not I deceive
myself?" Uttering these words, he turned to the early works which he
had painted so purely, so unselfishly, in former days, in his wretched
cabin yonder in lonely Vasilievsky Ostroff. He began attentively to
examine them all; and all the misery of his former life came back to
him. "Yes," he cried despairingly, "I had talent: the signs and traces
of it are everywhere visible--"
He paused suddenly, and shivered all over. His eyes encountered other
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
