| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: the subject of a passing jest. But then came the pilgrimage of
the Queen and her ladies to Engaddi, a journey which the Queen
had undertaken under a vow for the recovery of her husband's
health, and which she had been encouraged to carry into effect by
the Archbishop of Tyre for a political purpose. It was then, and
in the chapel at that holy place, connected from above with a
Carmelite nunnery, from beneath with the cell of the anchorite,
that one of the Queen's attendants remarked that secret sign of
intelligence which Edith had made to her lover, and failed not
instantly to communicate it to her Majesty. The Queen returned
from her pilgrimage enriched with this admirable recipe against
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poor and Proud by Oliver Optic: These were not all temporal blessings; if they had been, their
success would only have been partial and temporary, their
prosperity only an outward seeming, which, in the truest and
highest sense, can hardly be called prosperity; no more than if a
man should gain a thousand dollars worth of land, and lose a
thousand dollars worth of stocks or merchandise. Both Katy and
her mother, while they were gathering the treasures of this
world, were also "laying up treasures in heaven, where neither
moth nor rust doth corrupt." Want had taught them its hard
lessons, and they had come out of the fiery furnace of affliction
the wiser and the better for the severe ordeal. The mother's
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: feature, save the old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of
brand-new Madonna. But the inn was clean and large. The kitchen,
with its two box-beds hung with clean check curtains, with its wide
stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with
lanterns and religious statuettes, its array of chests and pair of
ticking clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen ought to be; a
melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or noblemen in disguise.
Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, silent,
dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun. Even the
public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
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