| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: yet, before he fell asleep he ran a searching eye over the list of
magistrates, taking all their secret ambitions into account, casting
about for ways of influencing them, calculating his chances in the
coming struggle. Chesnel's prolonged scrutiny of consciences, given in
a condensed form, will perhaps serve as a picture of the judicial
world in a country town.
Magistrates and officials generally are obliged to begin their career
in the provinces; judicial ambition there ferments. At the outset
every man looks towards Paris; they all aspire to shine in the vast
theatre where great political causes come before the courts, and the
higher branches of the legal profession are closely connected with the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: sat a long time on top of the church steeple. Wherever he went the
Sparrows chirruped, and said to each other, "What a distinguished
stranger!" so he enjoyed himself very much.
When the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince. "Have you any
commissions for Egypt?" he cried; "I am just starting."
"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not
stay with me one night longer?"
"I am waited for in Egypt," answered the Swallow. "To-morrow my
friends will fly up to the Second Cataract. The river-horse
couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne
sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: to serve them for ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only
the idea of the family that is really important, a case of
abstraction of an abstract. These suggestive customs are the
far-eastern practices of adoption and abdication.
Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping
of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species
of self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves
when fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of
counteracting the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain
unglamoured view of the procedure is shown by the age at which the
object is adopted. Usually the future son or daughter enters the
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