| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: lowest step into the street. On the day when we first found ourselves
bereft of tobacco for our pipes, it struck us that for some days we
had been eating bread without any kind of butter.
Great was our distress.
"No tobacco!" said the Doctor.
"No cloak!" said the Keeper of the Seals.
"Ah, you rascals, you would dress as the postillion de Longjumeau, you
would appear as Debardeurs, sup in the morning, and breakfast at night
at Very's--sometimes even at the /Rocher de Cancale/.--Dry bread for
you, my boys! Why," said I, in a big bass voice, "you deserve to sleep
under the bed, you are not worthy to lie in it--"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London: slowly drop forward and down. At the instant Fortune's left
breast and the sight flashed into line with his eye, he pulled the
trigger. Fortune did not whirl, but gay San Francisco dimmed and
faded, and as the sun-bright snow turned black and blacker, he
breathed his last malediction on the Chance he had misplayed.
SIWASH
"If I was a man--" Her words were in themselves indecisive, but
the withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not
lost upon the men-folk in the tent.
Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick
Humphries, Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: Providence?
"From this time forward," he seems to say, "the fates cannot beggar
me, for I have eaten strawberries. With every Maytime that visits
this distracted island, the white blossoms with hearts of gold will
arrive. In every June the red drops of pleasant savour will hang
among the scalloped leaves. The children of this world may wrangle
and give one another wounds that even my good ale cannot cure.
Nevertheless, the earth as God created it is a fair dwelling and
full of comfort for all who have a quiet mind and a thankful heart.
Doubtless God might have made a better world, but doubtless this is
the world He made for us; and in it He planted the strawberry."
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