| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: and their wives came to see us immediately, without waiting for us
to make the first visit, which is the rule, and almost every person
whom we have met in society, which certainly indicates an amiable
feeling toward our country. We could not well have received more
courtesy than we have done, and it has been extended freely and
immediately, without waiting for the forms of etiquette. Pray say
to Mr. Everett how often we hear persons speak of him, and with
highest regard. I feel as if we were reaping some of the fruits of
his sowing.
Mr. Bancroft sends you a pack of cards, one of the identical two
packs with which the Queen played Patience the evening he was at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social
and economic relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the
limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can
trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in
which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can
see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and
here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a
little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the
big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram--
after the untraceable confusion of London.
I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: rivals, had come tearing after, clapping the frequent red face to
the chaise-window, lavishly shedding their gold about the post-
houses, sedulously loading and re-loading, as they went, their
avenging pistols! But I doubt if I had thought of it at all,
before a wayside hazard swept me into the thick of an adventure of
this nature; and I found myself playing providence with other
people's lives, to my own admiration at the moment - and
subsequently to my own brief but passionate regret.
At rather an ugly corner of an uphill reach I came on the wreck of
a chaise lying on one side in the ditch, a man and a woman in
animated discourse in the middle of the road, and the two
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