| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: FISHERMAN'S LUCK
Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the
greetings that belong to certain occupations?
There is something about these salutations in kind which is
singularly taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better
than an ordinary "good day" or a flat "how are you?" as a folk-song
of Scotland or the Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of the
drawing-room. They have a spicy and rememberable flavour. They
speak to the imagination and point the way to treasure-trove.
There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free
and easy--the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: he said with nonchalance. "Only it won't last long."
"How do you mean--'won't last long'?", asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts
fried with her own hands, which she gave him on his
morning round. He dropped his half-defiant tone.
"The thing of it's this," he explained. "Every new
minister starts in saying we can deliver to this house
on Sundays, an' then gives us notice to stop before
the month's out. It's the trustees that does it."
The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on
to the stoop beside his wife. "What's that you say?"
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: roof. I was not rich enough to have a good room; I was not even rich
enough to have a room to myself. Juste and I shared a double-bedded
room on the fifth floor.
On our side of the landing there were but two rooms--ours and a
smaller one, occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. For six months Juste
and I remained in perfect ignorance of the fact. The old woman who
managed the house had indeed told us that the room was inhabited, but
she had added that we should not be disturbed, that the occupant was
exceedingly quiet. In fact, for those six months, we never met our
fellow-lodger, and we never heard a sound in his room, in spite of the
thinness of the partition that divided us--one of those walls of lath
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