| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: slain. These, however, the Thebans were not disposed to give back
unless they agreed to retire from their territory. The terms were
gladly accepted by the Lacedaemonians, who at once picked up the
corpses of the slain, and prepared to quit the territory of Boeotia.
The preliminaries were transacted, and the retreat commenced.
Despondent indeed was the demeanour of the Lacedaemonians, in contrast
with the insolent bearing of the Thebans, who visited the slightest
attempt to trespass on their private estates with blows and chased the
offenders back on to the high roads unflinchingly. Such was the
conclusion of the campaign of the Lacedaemonians.
As for Pausanias, on his arrival at home he was tried on the capital
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: and of course it had not taken very much to alarm
Falk; but, instead of declaring himself, he had
taken steps to remove the family from under my in-
fluence. He was perfectly straightforward about
it--as straightforward as a tile falling on your
head. There was no duplicity in that man; and
when I congratulated him on the perfection of his
arrangements--even to the bribing of the wretched
Johnson against me--he had a genuine movement
of protest. Never bribed. He knew the man
wouldn't work as long as he had a few cents in his
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like
a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan
propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his
shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the
famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which
had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the
department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and
moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an
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