| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: each of whose words stood for an ingot of gold:
"'The remark which I made to the distressed stranger was this: "You
are very far from being a bad man; go, and reform."'" Then he
continued:- "We shall know in a moment now whether the remark here
quoted corresponds with the one concealed in the sack; and if that
shall prove to be so--and it undoubtedly will--this sack of gold
belongs to a fellow-citizen who will henceforth stand before the
nation as the symbol of the special virtue which has made our town
famous throughout the land--Mr. Billson!"
The house had gotten itself all ready to burst into the proper
tornado of applause; but instead of doing it, it seemed stricken
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: the distant drumming of the grouse on his log, the rumble of
the water-fall in the River of Rocks. The spray cooled his
face. He saw the fish rising along the pool, and a stag
feeding among the lily-pads.
"I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Wilson," said he at
last, when the elder man stopped talking. "You have certainly
treated me most generously. The only question is, whether--
But to-morrow night, I think, with your consent, I will speak
to your daughter. To-night I am going down to the store;
there is a good deal of work to do on the books."
But when Luke came to the store, he did not go in. He
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: can discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and
delicate delights for which we are steeped in a thousand
superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that
lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to
another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or
excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in
part for perdurable attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman
possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of
use and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her
tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her most natural
moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence her memory is
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