| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: the air with his voice; "You will frighten it--"
"What?"
"An otter, my good gentleman. If it hears us it'll go quick under
water. I'm certain it jumped there; see! see! there, where the water
bubbles! Ha! it sees a fish, it is after that! But my boy will grab it
as it comes back. The otter, don't you know, is very rare; it is
scientific game, and good eating, too. I get ten francs for every one
I carry to Les Aigues, for the lady fasts Fridays, and to-morrow is
Friday. Years agone the deceased madame used to pay me twenty francs,
and gave me the skin to boot! Mouche," he called, in a low voice,
"watch it!"
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: Chinoise!--There, in the corner to the left; she has bluebells in the
knot of chestnut curls which fall in clusters on her head. Do not you
see her? She is so pale you might fancy she was ill, delicate-looking,
and very small; there--now she is turning her head this way; her
almond-shaped blue eyes, so delightfully soft, look as if they were
made expressly for tears. Look, look! She is bending forward to see
Madame de Vaudremont below the crowd of heads in constant motion; the
high head-dresses prevent her having a clear view."
"I see her now, my dear fellow. You had only to say that she had the
whitest skin of all the women here; I should have known whom you
meant. I had noticed her before; she has the loveliest complexion I
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: She said: "O sir, ane of the bairns fand it lang syne at the
Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and thinking
it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole, and
it has layen there ever since." '
This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the
master hand of Scott himself:
`At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island,
called Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie
Millie, who helped out her subsistence by selling favourable
winds to mariners. He was a venturous master of a vessel who
left the roadstead of Stromness without paying his offering to
|
