| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: anyway!" Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in
the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom
of the clump, I thought this a remarkable example. The sense
of locality must be singularly in abeyance in the case of
Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy
at work on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we
were all out on the platform together, sitting there, under
the tented heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we
had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound of brisk
footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: paused for the night at a small hostelry lying out
of the ordinary route, where, however, he obtained
from a wandering minstrel news of the event of the
tourney.
On the next morning the knight departed early,
with the intention of making a long journey; the
condition of his horse, which he had carefully spared
during the preceding morning, being such as enabled
him to travel far without the necessity of much
repose. Yet his purpose was baffled by the devious
paths through which he rode, so that when evening
Ivanhoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: generation has often nothing to show for its existence but one solitary
gem which some one man--often unnoticed in his time--has picked up for
them, and so given them "a local habitation and a name."
Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep wells were
enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer solstice, and that
vertical objects cast no shadows.
He had before suggested, as is supposed, to Ptolemy Euergetes, to make
him the two great copper armillae, or circles for determining the
equinox, which stood for centuries in "that which is called the Square
Porch"--probably somewhere in the Museum. By these he had calculated
the obliquity of the ecliptic, closely enough to serve for a thousand
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