| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and
beauty lurks there. No imagination can reach the Truth, no one can go
down into that city to make discoveries; for one must needs descend
too low into its depths to see the wonderful scenes of tragedy or
comedy enacted there, the masterpieces brought forth by chance.
I do not know how it is that I have kept the following story so long
untold. It is one of the curious things that stop in the bag from
which Memory draws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a
lottery. There are plenty of tales just as strange and just as well
hidden still left; but some day, you may be sure, their turn will
come.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: otherwise. And the firm which does these things is quite
extraneous, a wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but
to itself; few natives drawing from it so much as day's wages; and
the rest beholding in it only the occupier of their acres. The
nearest villages have suffered most; they see over the hedge the
lands of their ancestors waving with useless cocoa-palms; and the
sales were often questionable, and must still more often appear so
to regretful natives, spinning and improving yarns about the
evening lamp. At the worst, then, to help oneself from the
plantation will seem to a Samoan very like orchard-breaking to the
British schoolboy; at the best, it will be thought a gallant Robin-
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland:
The game furnishes large opportunity for invention on the part of
the servant, depending upon the number of those to be stolen.
This little girl seemed to be at her wit's end when she gave as
the excuse for the loss of the last one that it had been eaten by
a chicken.
This game suggested to our little friend another which proved to
be the sequel to the one just described, and she called out:
"The flower-seller."
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