| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: himself to port.
But when he was gone, I appealed to Nares on the same
subject, for I was well aware we carried none of these
provisions.
"Well," drawled Nares, "there's sixty pounds of niggerhead on
the quay, isn't there? and twenty pounds of salts; and I never
travel without some painkiller in my gripsack."
As a matter of fact, we were richer. The captain had the usual
sailor's provision of quack medicines, with which, in the usual
sailor fashion, he would daily drug himself, displaying an
extreme inconstancy, and flitting from Kennedy's Red
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: rhetoric the greater power?
PHAEDRUS: Clearly, in the uncertain class.
SOCRATES: Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and
acquire a distinct notion of both classes, as well of that in which the
many err, as of that in which they do not err?
PHAEDRUS: He who made such a distinction would have an excellent
principle.
SOCRATES: Yes; and in the next place he must have a keen eye for the
observation of particulars in speaking, and not make a mistake about the
class to which they are to be referred.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: childhood which had set in.
Drybone had known a wholesome adventurous youth, where manly lives and
deaths were plenty. It had been an army post. It had seen horse and foot,
and heard the trumpet. Brave wives had kept house for their captains upon
its bluffs. Winter and summer they had made the best of it. When the War
Department ordered the captains to catch Indians, the wives bade them
Godspeed. When the Interior Department ordered the captains to let the
Indians go again, still they made the best of it. You must not waste
Indians. Indians were a source of revenue to so many people in Washington
and elsewhere. But the process of catching Indians, armed with weapons
sold them by friends of the Interior Department, was not entirely
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