| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: might have imposed upon a judge. It was small wonder if the maid
were taken with the picture we presented, of a poor, sick,
overwrought lad and his most tender comrade. She drew quite
near, and stood leaning with her back on the next table.
"What's like wrong with him?" said she at last.
Alan turned upon her, to my great wonder, with a kind of fury.
"Wrong?" cries he. "He's walked more hundreds of miles than he
has hairs upon his chin, and slept oftener in wet heather than
dry sheets. Wrong, quo' she! Wrong enough, I would think!
Wrong, indeed!" and he kept grumbling to himself as he fed me,
like a man ill-pleased.
Kidnapped |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: following the funeral of a living man, a man my heart cared for, an
innocent man! The poor young fellow never ceased to look at me. He
seemed to live only in me. He wanted, he said, that I should carry to
his mother his last sigh."
"And did you?"
"At the peace of Amiens I went to France, for the purpose of taking to
the mother those blessed words, 'He was innocent.' I religiously
undertook that pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption.
It was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I
was the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I
see a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: this fashion: "What are you doing, Ivan Ivanovitch? Fear God! throw
away that plaint, let it go! may Satan carry it off! Better take Ivan
Nikiforovitch by the hand and kiss him, buy some Santurinski or
Nikopolski liquor, make a punch, and call me in. We will drink it up
together and forget all unpleasantness."
"No, Demyan Demyanovitch! it's not that sort of an affair," said Ivan
Ivanovitch, with the dignity which always became him so well; "it is
not an affair which can be arranged by a friendly agreement. Farewell!
Good-day to you, too, gentlemen," he continued with the same dignity,
turning to them all. "I hope that my plaint will lead to proper action
being taken;" and out he went, leaving all present in a state of
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
