| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he
now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing
it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would
have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without
other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction,
been closed SINCE his former visitation, the matter probably of a
quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the
wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding
his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had been
SUBSEQUENTLY closed - that is it had been on his previous passage
indubitably open!
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: rise, and choked upon tears, to behold them thus parodied. The
more part, as I have said, were peasants, somewhat bettered perhaps
by the drill-sergeant, but for all that ungainly, loutish fellows,
with no more than a mere barrack-room smartness of address: indeed,
you could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented
than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in
fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage would
but point the insult of the travesty. And I remembered the days
when I wore the coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and
remembered further back how many of the noble, the fair, and the
gracious had taken a delight to tend my childhood. . . . But I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: and the longer he lived the stronger and longer his memory grew.
If he lives to die again, he will distinctly recollect the discovery
of America.
The above r'esum'e of his biography I believe to be substantially
correct, although it is possible that he may have died once or twice
in obscure places where the event failed of newspaper notoriety.
One fault I find in all the notices of his death I have quoted,
and this ought to be correct. In them he uniformly and impartially
died at the age of 95. This could not have been. He might have
done that once, or maybe twice, but he could not have continued
it indefinitely. Allowing that when he first died, he died at
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