| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: Only--only coming from a land where a man begins to lightly turn
to thoughts of love not before he is thirty, I own that playing
at house-keeping before that age rather surprised me. Out in the
West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from sixteen upward,
and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband aged
twenty.
"When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?"
From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks
and a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia
are not satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to
the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: So spoke on the beach the mother, and counselled the wiser thing.
For Rahero stirred in the country and secretly mined the king.
Nor were the signals wanting of how the leaven wrought,
In the cords of obedience loosed and the tributes grudgingly brought.
And when last to the temple of Oro the boat with the victim sped,
And the priest uncovered the basket and looked on the face of the dead,
Trembling fell upon all at sight of an ominous thing,
For there was the aito (1) dead, and he of the house of the king.
So spake on the beach the mother, matter worthy of note,
And wattled a basket well, and chose a fish from the boat;
And Tamatea the pliable shouldered the basket and went,
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: and tidy, they saw a coffin set upon two chairs, and covered with a
black pall. Four tall candles stood about it, and on a stool near by
there was a shallow brass dish full of holy water, in which a branch
of green box-wood was steeping. Every passer-by went into the yard,
knelt by the side of the dead, said a Pater noster, and sprinkled a
few drops of holy water on the bier. Above the black cloth that
covered the coffin rose the green sprays of a jessamine that grew
beside the doorway, and a twisted vine shoot, already in leaf, overran
the lintel. Even the saddest ceremonies demand that things shall
appear to the best advantage, and in obedience to this vaguely-felt
requirement a young girl had been sweeping the front of the house. The
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