| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: there were seventeen, six men must carry each of them by the help
of paddles lashed on either side, and then the task was not light.
All this priceless stuff we bore in several journeys to the crest
of a rise some six hundred paces distant from the water, setting it
down by the mouth of a shaft behind the shelter of a mound of
earth. When everything was brought up from the boats, Guatemoc
touched me and another man, a great Aztec noble, born of a
Tlascalan mother, on the shoulder, asking us if we were willing to
descend with him into the hole, and there to dispose of the
treasure.
'Gladly,' I answered, for I was curious to see the place, but the
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: jingled as he strode.
"The pipe," said he.
"It is farther on," said I; "but observe the white web-work
which gleams from these cavern walls."
He turned towards me, and looked into my eyes with two filmy
orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication.
"Nitre?" he asked, at length.
"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough?"
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!--ugh! ugh! ugh!--ugh! ugh! ugh!--ugh! ugh!
ugh!--ugh! ugh! ugh!"
My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: what you had seen, and could have sworn to:--But this is an advantage not
to be had by the biographer in this planet;--in the planet Mercury (belike)
it may be so, if not better still for him;--for there the intense heat of
the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun,
to be more than equal to that of red-hot iron,--must, I think, long ago
have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to
suit them for the climate (which is the final cause;) so that betwixt them
both, all the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing
else, for aught the soundest philosophy can shew to the contrary, but one
fine transparent body of clear glass (bating the umbilical knot)--so that,
till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of
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