| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: and dangerous and secret; and presently, as we began to go on
alongside, I saw the steel butt of a pistol sticking from under
the flap of his coat-pocket. To carry such a thing meant a fine
of fifteen pounds sterling upon a first offence, and
transportation to the colonies upon a second. Nor could I quite
see why a religious teacher should go armed, or what a blind man
could be doing with a pistol.
I told him about my guide, for I was proud of what I had done,
and my vanity for once got the heels of my prudence. At the
mention of the five shillings he cried out so loud that I made up
my mind I should say nothing of the other two, and was glad he
Kidnapped |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: bourgeois republicans who still held the seats in the National Assembly.
As brutally as these pure republicans had abused their own physical
power against the people, so cowardly, low-spirited, disheartened,
broken, powerless did they yield, now when the issue was the maintenance
of their own republicanism and their own legislative rights against the
Executive power and the royalists I need not here narrate the shameful
history of their dissolution. It was not a downfall, it was extinction.
Their history is at an end for all time. In the period that follows,
they figure, whether within or without the Assembly, only as
memories--memories that seem again to come to life so soon as the
question is again only the word "Republic," and as often as the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: on, on a day when the courts were not sitting, and of which I will tell
a trifle more at length.
We took horse early, and passed first by the house of Shaws, where it
stood smokeless in a great field of white frost, for it was yet early
in the day. Here Prestongrange alighted down, gave me his horse, an
proceeded alone to visit my uncle. My heart, I remember, swelled up
bitter within me at the sight of that bare house and the thought of the
old miser sitting chittering within in the cold kitchen!
"There is my home," said I; "and my family."
"Poor David Balfour!" said Miss Grant.
What passed during the visit I have never heard; but it would doubtless
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