| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: FreundE, of my good friends. D.--MeinEN gutEN FreundEN,
to my good friends. A.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize
those variations, and see how soon he will be elected.
One might better go without friends in Germany than take
all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother
it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is
only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new
distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object
is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.
Now there are more adjectives in this language than there
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: the Black Death, and ruinous she would remain; and I
could hang myself in my new scaffold-ropes! Gentle and
simple, high and low - the Hayes, the Fowles, the
Fenners, the Collinses - they were all in a tale against me.
Only Sir John Pelham up yonder at Brightling bade me
heart-up and go on. Yet how could I? Did I ask Master
Collins for his timber-tug to haul beams? The oxen had
gone to Lewes after lime. Did he promise me a set of iron
cramps or ties for the roof? They never came to hand, or
else they were spaulty or cracked. So with everything.
Nothing said, but naught done except I stood by them,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: exiled, impoverished, and embarked in the tobacco trade.
R. L. S.
NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS
A SECOND SERIES
THE DYNAMITER
PROLOGUE OF THE CIGAR DIVAN
IN the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West, and, to be
more precise, on the broad northern pavement of Leicester
Square, two young men of five- or six-and-twenty met after
years of separation. The first, who was of a very smooth
address and clothed in the best fashion, hesitated to
|
