| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: recks neither of heaven nor of hell.---I have heard
old men talk of prayer---prayer by their own voice
---Such need not to court or to bribe the false priest
---But I---I dare not!''
``Lives Reginald Front-de-Buf,'' said a broken
and shrill voice close by his bedside, ``to say there
is that which he dares not!''
The evil conscience and the shaken nerves of
Front-de-Buf heard, in this strange interruption
to his soliloquy, the voice of one of those demons,
who, as the superstition of the times believed, beset
Ivanhoe |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: Bonaparte made a sign to Lucien, who kept silence. Then he looked at
Piombo and said:--
"Why did you kill the Portas?"
"We had made friends," replied the man; "the Barbantis reconciled us.
The day after we had drunk together to drown our quarrels, I left home
because I had business at Bastia. The Portas remained in my house, and
set fire to my vineyard at Longone. They killed my son Gregorio. My
daughter Ginevra and my wife, having taken the sacrament that morning,
escaped; the Virgin protected them. When I returned I found no house;
my feet were in its ashes as I searched for it. Suddenly they struck
against the body of Gregorio; I recognized him in the moonlight. 'The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: of the gold, however, his lazy attitude relaxed slightly; he took his
pipe from his mouth and shuffled into the room.
He then pointed over his shoulder at the attic up in the wall.
"She can wait up there!" he said with a grunt. "It's comfortable,
and I have no other room."
"Nothing could be better," said Marguerite in English; she at
once realised the advantages such a position hidden from view would
give her. "Give him the money, Sir Andrew; I shall be quite happy up
there, and can see everything without being seen."
She nodded to Brogard, who condescended to go up to the attic,
and to shake up the straw that lay on the floor.
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
