| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: ghost-story; and some of them are rather unpleasant."
"Yes--but those dogs?" I insisted.
"Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the
peasants say there's one day in the year when a lot of dogs
appear there; and that day the keeper and his daughter go off to
Morlaix and get drunk. The women in Brittany drink dreadfully."
She stooped to match a silk; then she lifted her charming
inquisitive Parisian face: "Did you REALLY see a lot of dogs?
There isn't one at Kerfol," she said.
II
Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: Alcibiades was a favourite thesis, and that at least five or six dialogues
bearing this name passed current in antiquity, and are attributed to
contemporaries of Socrates and Plato. (1) In the entire absence of real
external evidence (for the catalogues of the Alexandrian librarians cannot
be regarded as trustworthy); and (2) in the absence of the highest marks
either of poetical or philosophical excellence; and (3) considering that we
have express testimony to the existence of contemporary writings bearing
the name of Alcibiades, we are compelled to suspend our judgment on the
genuineness of the extant dialogue.
Neither at this point, nor at any other, do we propose to draw an absolute
line of demarcation between genuine and spurious writings of Plato. They
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: battered in its long journey out of the deep water about the ore
rock. For all these you must consult Johnson's "Zoophytes," and
for a dozen smaller species, which you would probably find tangled
among them, or parasitic on the sea-weed. Here are Flustrae, or
sea-mats. This, which smells very like Verbena, is Flustra
coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2). That scurf on the frond of ore-weed is
F. lineata (Pl. Fig. 1). The glass bells twined about this
Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (Pl. I. Fig. 9); and here is a
tiny plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I. Fig. 8). Look at it
through the field-glass; for it is truly wonderful. Each polype
cell is edged with whip-like spines, and on the back of some of
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