| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: his voice, punctuated by the occasional thud of horses' hoofs, came
to me.
"Something light will do," he was saying. "A runabout, perhaps."
He came forward rubbing his hands, followed by a thin man in
overalls. "Mr. Peck says," he began, - "this is Mr. Peck of Peck
and Peck, - says that the place we are looking for is about seven
miles from the town. It's clearing, isn't it?"
"It is not," I returned savagely. "And we don't want a runabout,
Mr. Peck. What we require is hermetically sealed diving suit. I
suppose there isn't a machine to be had?" Mr. Peck gazed at me, in
silence: machine to him meant other things than motors. "Automobile,"
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.
"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.
But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the
remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the
eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb
fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.
"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.
"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back. "Gimme a tow!
I'll pay you!"
"Come on!" they howled in chorus.
A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: the Adler about a hundred yards away. Then they had thrust him
overboard.
Down he fell, hands and feet extending, until with a jerk he was
at the end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung
edifyingly, but instead a more terrible thing happened; his head
came right off, and down the body went spinning to the sea,
feeble, grotesque, fantastic, with the head racing it in its
fall.
"Ugh!" said Bert, clutching the rail before him, and a
sympathetic grunt came from several of the men beside him.
"So!" said the Prince, stiffer and sterner, glared for some
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