| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first
necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.
The maid brought a light to show him up.
"Felicie," he said, "don't you hear a noise in the street, shouts,
cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."
His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading
aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys
followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three
stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands
in his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm
scene, so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: I had such and such particular persons with me, as well to increase
and recruit their number, as by the particular necessary
employments which they were bred to, being artificers, to assist
them in those things in which at present they were in want.
They were all together when I talked thus to them; and before I
delivered to them the stores I had brought, I asked them, one by
one, if they had entirely forgot and buried the first animosities
that had been among them, and would shake hands with one another,
and engage in a strict friendship and union of interest, that so
there might be no more misunderstandings and jealousies.
Will Atkins, with abundance of frankness and good humour, said they
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: Where was I? Ha!--on the table before me was my grandmother's
snuff-box, and by its side one of those awful--those admirable--
sensation novels, which I had been reading, and which are full of
delicious wonder.
But that the guillotine is still to be seen at Mr. Gale's, No. 47,
High Holborn, I give you MY HONOR. I suppose I was dreaming about
it. I don't know. What is dreaming? What is life? Why shouldn't
I sleep on the ceiling?--and am I sitting on it now, or on the
floor? I am puzzled. But enough. If the fashion for sensation
novels goes on, I tell you I will write one in fifty volumes. For
the present, DIXI. But between ourselves, this Pinto, who fought
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