| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: operation. To spare the feelings of poor Martener he went to Paris and
brought back with him the celebrated Desplein. Thus the operation was
performed by the greatest surgeon of ancient or modern times; but that
terrible diviner said to Martener as he departed with Bianchon, his
best-loved pupil:--
"Nothing but a miracle can save her. As Horace told you, caries of the
bone has begun. At her age the bones are so tender."
The operation was performed at the beginning of March, 1828. During
all that month, distressed by Pierrette's horrible sufferings,
Monsieur Martener made several journeys to Paris; there he consulted
Desplein and Bianchon, and even went so far as to propose to them an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: --her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for
half an hour with his finger between the leaves and the
closed book resting on his knees. Perhaps he had re-
membered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she used
to be.
She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too.
It was like an article of faith with him that there never
had been, and never could be, a brighter, cheerier home
anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under the poop-
deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white
and gold, garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last you will take
on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves
to German and though at the beginning of winter they come with their
wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas they will have
given up the English for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a
skirmish between the two races; the German element seeking, in the
interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious item, the KUR-TAXE,
which figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills, the English
element stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English hotels home-
played farces, TABLEAUX-VIVANTS, and even balls enliven the evenings;
a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year
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