| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: more magical. For every time I take up a handful of them they
transport me to the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with
knapsack and fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.
I.
BELL-HEATHER.
Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under
the lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there
can be no better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real
book, and, by preference, a novel.
Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown.
And the scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: Pray excuse the marquis. A husband, however good he may be, never
attains perfection. As they went up the staircase Rastignac perceived
at least a dozen blunders in worldly wisdom which had, unaccountably,
slipped into this page of the glorious book of his life.
When Madame de Listomere saw her husband ushering in Eugene she could
not help blushing. The young baron saw that sudden color. If the most
humble-minded man retains in the depths of his soul a certain conceit
of which he never rids himself, any more than a woman ever rids
herself of coquetry, who shall blame Eugene if he did say softly in
his own mind: "What! that fortress, too?" So thinking, he posed in his
cravat. Young men may not be grasping but they like to get a new coin
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: people, strange to say, it is very bitter; but whatever you find yourself
is sweet!
When she had finished she dug out another piece, and went to look for a
pantry to put it in. At the top of a heap of rocks up which she clambered
she found that some large stones stood apart but met at the top, making a
room.
"Oh, this is my little home!" she said.
At the top and all round it was closed, only in the front it was open.
There was a beautiful shelf in the wall for the kippersol, and she
scrambled down again. She brought a great bunch of prickly pear, and stuck
it in a crevice before the door, and hung wild asparagus over it, till it
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