| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: be worn by any but kings, dukes, and certain lords clothed with
official powers. A distinction was made between the greater and lesser
/vair/. The very name has been so long disused, that in a vast number
of editions of Perrault's famous tale, Cinderella's slipper, which was
no doubt of /vair/ (the fur), is said to have been made of /verre/
(glass). Lately one of our most distinguished poets was obliged to
establish the true orthography of the word for the instruction of his
brother-feuilletonists in giving an account of the opera of the
"Cenerentola," where the symbolic slipper has been replaced by a ring,
which symbolizes nothing at all.
Naturally the sumptuary laws about the wearing of fur were perpetually
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were three poets,
Saa, Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very
remote systems. These three names are common and familiar in every
nook and corner of heaven, clear from one end of it to the other -
fully as well known as the eighty Supreme Archangels, in fact -
where as our Moses, and Adam, and the rest, have not been heard of
outside of our world's little corner of heaven, except by a few
very learned men scattered here and there - and they always spell
their names wrong, and get the performances of one mixed up with
the doings of another, and they almost always locate them simply IN
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, and think that is enough without going into
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may
be called dead.
It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing
the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.
The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing
in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing;
and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic
by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river
at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition
was out of the question.
Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers.
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