The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "God!" he muttered. "What an awful punishment you
have visited upon me for the sin of the thing I did."
The silence which followed was broken by Sing who had
kneeled opposite Virginia upon the other side of Bulan,
where he was feeling the giant's wrists and pressing
his ear close above his heart.
"Do'n cly, Linee," said the kindly old Chinaman.
"Him no dlead." Then, as he poured a pinch of brownish
powder into the man's mouth from a tiny sack he had
brought forth from the depths of one of his sleeves:
"Him no mlonster either, Linee. Him white man,
 The Monster Men |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: war party of Indians captured our unlucky merchant, and carried
him to Montreal, there holding him in bondage, till, by the
payment of a heavy ransom, he had wofully subtracted from his
hoard of pine-tree shillings. By his long absence, moreover, his
affairs had become so disordered that, for the rest of his life,
instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence worth of
copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned to his
laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground
to powder, dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible, and burned
with the blow-pipe, and published the result of his experiments
in one of the heaviest folios of the day. And, for all these
 Twice Told Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: Freddie, you know, but of course it ain't. I always tell these
people some name like that, because if they got onto your right name
they might use it sometime. Understand? Oh, they don't fool me much."
Maggie was paying no attention, being intent upon the doors.
The mere boy relapsed into a period of gloom, during which he
exterminated a number of cock-tails with a determined air, as if
replying defiantly to fate. He occasionally broke forth into
sentences composed of invectives joined together in a long string.
The girl was still staring at the doors. After a time
the mere boy began to see cobwebs just in front of his nose.
He spurred himself into being agreeable and insisted upon her
 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |