| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: this would be for you, and how all-important it was to set it
right. He rushed down, just as he was, in his bare feet, opened
the window, sprang out into the snow, and ran down the lane,
where he could see a dark figure in the moonlight. Sir George
Burnwell tried to get away, but Arthur caught him, and there was
a struggle between them, your lad tugging at one side of the
coronet, and his opponent at the other. In the scuffle, your son
struck Sir George and cut him over the eye. Then something
suddenly snapped, and your son, finding that he had the coronet
in his hands, rushed back, closed the window, ascended to your
room, and had just observed that the coronet had been twisted in
 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: . . . I HAVE the strangest repugnance for writing; indeed, I have
nearly got myself persuaded into the notion that letters don't
arrive, in order to salve my conscience for never sending them off.
I'm reading a great deal of fifteenth century: TRIAL OF JOAN OF
ARC, PASTON LETTERS, BASIN, etc., also BOSWELL daily by way of a
Bible; I mean to read BOSWELL now until the day I die. And now and
again a bit of PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Is that all? Yes, I think
that's all. I have a thing in proof for the CORNHILL called
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE. 'Charles of Orleans' is again laid aside,
but in a good state of furtherance this time. A paper called 'A
Defence of Idlers' (which is really a defence of R. L. S.) is in a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: ordinary at a public-house in Coleman Street - and the poor fellow,
having not usually had a bellyful for perhaps not a good while, was
laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fast asleep, at a door
in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate-, and that upon
the same bulk or stall the people of some house, in the alley of which
the house was a corner, hearing a bell which they always rang before
the cart came, had laid a body really dead of the plague just by him,
thinking, too, that this poor fellow had been a dead body, as the other
was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.
Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and the cart came
along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up
 A Journal of the Plague Year |