| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: each other, that might or might not ripen into something closer.
So we kissed and bade farewell with tears.
And after that my father and I rode away. But when we had passed
down Pirnhow Street, and mounted the little hill beyond Waingford
Mills to the left of Bungay town, I halted my horse, and looked
back upon the pleasant valley of the Waveney where I was born, and
my heart grew full to bursting. Had I known all that must befall
me, before my eyes beheld that scene again, I think indeed that it
would have burst. But God, who in his wisdom has laid many a
burden upon the backs of men, has saved them from this; for had we
foreknowledge of the future, I think that of our own will but few
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: an expose of the methods employed in making liver-
wurst, a continued story of a Standard Preferred
International Baking Powder deal in Wall Street, a
'poem' on the bear that the President missed, an-
other 'story' by a young woman who spent a week
as a spy making overalls on the East Side, another
'fiction' story that reeks of the 'garage' and a cer-
tain make of automobile. Of course, the title contains
the words 'Cupid' and 'Chauffeur' -- an article on
naval strategy, illustrated with cuts of the Spanish
Armada, and the new Staten Island ferry-boats; an-
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: from points like these to those questions of general probability,
the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality
of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions
which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must
be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are
essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they
cannot, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but
appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on the experience of
life. Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts
of law are purely stationary, while the science of historical
probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the
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