| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: feathery gills, crabs, and shrimps, and hundreds of other animals,
all as strange in shape, and as brilliant in colour. You may let
your fancy run wild. Nothing so odd, nothing so gay, even entered
your dreams, or a poet's, as you may find alive at the bottom of
the sea, in the live flower-gardens of the sea-fairies.
There will be shoals of fish, too, playing in and out, as strange
and gaudy as the rest,--parrot-fish who browse on the live coral
with their beak-like teeth, as cattle browse on grass; and at the
bottom, it may be, larger and uglier fish, who eat the crabs and
shell-fish, shells and all, grinding them up as a dog grinds a
bone, and so turning shells and corals into fine soft mud, such as
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: the scandal was at an end; there were no female teachers in the
Department.
The Poet's Doom
AN Object was walking along the King's highway wrapped in
meditation and with little else on, when he suddenly found himself
at the gates of a strange city. On applying for admittance, he was
arrested as a necessitator of ordinances, and taken before the
King.
"Who are you," said the King, "and what is your business in life?"
"Snouter the Sneak," replied the Object, with ready invention;
"pick-pocket."
Fantastic Fables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men."
Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our
natures, that instinct to destroy which finds comparatively
harmless expression in certain forms of taking life, which is at
its worst when we fall to taking each other's. It is to check an
inconvenient form of the expression of this instinct that we
punish murderers with death. We must carry the definition of
murder a step farther before we can count on peace or
happiness??{in}??this world. We must concentrate all our
strength on?? fighting criminal nature, both in ourselves and in
the world around us. With the destructive forces of nature we
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
