| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide,
swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the
Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my
eyes--already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved
under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the
bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of
a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy
sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads,
raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I
perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: viz., that they have counted three hundred droves of turkeys (for
they drive them all in droves on foot) pass in one season over
Stratford Bridge on the River Stour, which parts Suffolk from
Essex, about six miles from Colchester, on the road from Ipswich to
London. These droves, as they say, generally contain from three
hundred to a thousand each drove; so that one may suppose them to
contain five hundred one with another, which is one hundred and
fifty thousand in all; and yet this is one of the least passages,
the numbers which travel by Newmarket Heath and the open country
and the forest, and also the numbers that come by Sudbury and Clare
being many more.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: was time to make a supply of cough-drops, and she had been bringing
forth herbs from dark and dry hiding-places, until now the pungent
dust and odor of them had resolved themselves into one mighty
flavor of spearmint that came from a simmering caldron of syrup in
the kitchen. She called it done, and well done, and had
ostentatiously left it to cool, and taken her knitting-work because
Mrs. Fosdick was busy with hers. They sat in the two rocking-
chairs, the small woman and the large one, but now and then I could
see that Mrs. Todd's thoughts remained with the cough-drops. The
time of gathering herbs was nearly over, but the time of syrups and
cordials had begun.
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