| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: perhaps the distant light footfalls, recalled him, while she
was still a good way off, to the possession of his faculties,
and he half raised himself and blinked upon the world. It
took him some time to recollect his thoughts. He had
awakened with a certain blank and childish sense of pleasure,
like a man who had received a legacy overnight; but this
feeling gradually died away, and was then suddenly and
stunningly succeeded by a conviction of the truth. The whole
story of the past night sprang into his mind with every
detail, as by an exercise of the direct and speedy sense of
sight, and he arose from the ditch and, with rueful courage,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: strength of the enemy.
A sort of cold dismay-something akin to fear-filled me when I had
estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,
haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for
him to have. But I left him whole-I had to make bitter acknowledgment
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;
and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously
Options |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: moment higher and higher, the bidders got on their mettle and grew
steadily more and more daring, more and more determined, the jumps
went from a dollar up to five, then to ten, then to twenty, then
fifty, then to a hundred, then -
At the beginning of the auction Richards whispered in distress to
his wife: "Oh, Mary, can we allow it? It--it --you see, it is an
honour--reward, a testimonial to purity of character, and--and--can
we allow it? Hadn't I better get up and--Oh, Mary, what ought we to
do?--what do you think we--" [Halliday's voice. "Fifteen I'm bid!--
fifteen for the sack!--twenty!--ah, thanks!--thirty--thanks again!
Thirty, thirty, thirty!--do I hear forty?--forty it is! Keep the
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
