| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: combination to say the least.
The fisherman's wife is represented in her boat, "making her
toilet at dawn using the water as a mirror." While we are assured
also that the woman sitting upon her veranda "finds it very
difficult to thread her needle by the pale light of the moon,"
which fact, few, I think, would question.
In one of the pictures "a beautiful maiden, in the bright
moonlight, came beneath the trees." This is evidently contrary to
Chinese ideas of propriety, for the Classic for girls tells us
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: wives and houses shared among the elders of the Church, and
his memory only recalled with bated breath and dreadful
headshakings. When I had been very still, and my presence
perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would arise among my
elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the closer
together and look behind them with scared eyes; and I might
gather from their whisperings how some one, rich, honoured,
healthy, and in the prime of his days, some one, perhaps, who
had taken me on his knees a week before, had in one hour been
spirited from home and family, and vanished like an image
from a mirror, leaving not a print behind. It was terrible,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: deserving of them. Neither is a man rejected from weakness or poverty or
obscurity of origin, nor honoured by reason of the opposite, as in other
states, but there is one principle--he who appears to be wise and good is a
governor and ruler. The basis of this our government is equality of birth;
for other states are made up of all sorts and unequal conditions of men,
and therefore their governments are unequal; there are tyrannies and there
are oligarchies, in which the one party are slaves and the others masters.
But we and our citizens are brethren, the children all of one mother, and
we do not think it right to be one another's masters or servants; but the
natural equality of birth compels us to seek for legal equality, and to
recognize no superiority except in the reputation of virtue and wisdom.
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