| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: natural parents, and grows up to inherit the estates of the
adoptive. Presents are doubtless exchanged, as at all junctures of
island life, social or international; but I never heard of any
banquet - the child's presence at the daily board perhaps
sufficing. We may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea
that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom
that 'he is the father who gives the child its morning draught.'
In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from
the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An
interesting parallel will probably occur to many of my readers.
What is the nature of the obligation assumed at such a festival?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis: up in your blanket with your feet to the fire and you
get to wondering things about things afore you go
to sleep. The silentness jest natcherally swamps
everything after a while, and then all them queer
little noises you never hear in the daytime comes
popping and poking through the silentness, or kind
o' scratching their way through it sometimes, and
makes it kind o' feel more silent than ever. And
if you are nigh a crick, purty soon it will sort of
get to talking to you, only you can't make out what
it's trying to say, and you get to wondering about
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: class of business. Can't you see who you are talking to? Can't
you talk sense? Can't you give us 'a dead bird' for a good
traderoom?"
"No, I don't suppose I can," returned old Bostock; "not when I
can't hear my own voice for two seconds together. It was gin
and guns I did it with."
"Take your gin and guns to Putney!" cried Hadden. "It was the
thing in your times, that's right enough; but you're old now, and
the game's up. I'll tell you what's wanted now-a-days, Bill
Bostock," said he; and did, and took ten minutes to it.
Carthew could not refrain from smiling. He began to think less
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