| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: IN your bag? Open it, and let me see.'
'No, no,' returned M'Guire. 'Oh no, not that. It's a
surprise; it's prepared expressly: a surprise for honest
cabmen.'
'No, you don't,' said the man, alighting from his perch, and
coming very close to the unhappy patriot. 'You're either
going to pay my fare, or get in again and drive to the
office.'
It was at this supreme hour of his distress, that M'Guire
spied the stout figure of one Godall, a tobacconist of Rupert
Street, drawing near along the Embankment. The man was not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: "The nice people don't come to the Adirondacks to fish," said she;
"they come to talk about the fishing twenty years ago. Besides,
what do you want to catch that trout for? If you do, the other men
will say you bought it, and the hotel will have to put in a new one
for the rest of the season."
The following year Beekman tried Moosehead Lake. Here he found an
atmosphere more favourable to his plan of education. There were a
good many people who really fished, and short expeditions in the
woods were quite fashionable. Cornelia had a camping-costume of the
most approved style made by Dewlap on Fifth Avenue,--pearl-gray with
linings of rose-silk,--and consented to go with her husband on a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: the fine, the witty with the wise, the little with the great.
Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems quite worthy
enough. Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway, we heap
them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not be tossed
aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when she bends
her head so lovingly to each.
As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no
less clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we
would be seems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another
beside ourselves, our castles in the air take on something of the
substance of stereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid
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