| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: taste a mouthful of food as long as she should be compelled to
remain in King Pluto's palace. How she contrived to maintain
her resolution, and at the same time to keep herself tolerably
plump and rosy, is more than I can explain; but some young
ladies, I am given to understand, possess the faculty of living
on air, and Proserpina seems to have possessed it too. At any
rate, it was now six months since she left the outside of the
earth; and not a morsel, so far as the attendants were able to
testify, had yet passed between her teeth. This was the more
creditable to Proserpina, inasmuch as King Pluto had caused her
to be tempted day by day, with all manner of sweetmeats, and
Tanglewood Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: she marveled, with the exceedingly great marveling
of a woman to whom love of a man has never come,
at a woman who could give so much and with no
return.
Little enough to pack had Viola. Jane under-
stood with a shudder of horror that it was almost
destitution, not poverty, to which her old friend was
reduced.
"You shall have that northeast room which you
always liked," she told Viola when they were on
the train.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: a dozen words with one of the waiters in Sol. Lowe's hotel. Such
waiters were in the way of hearing, at the table, the probable
course of things. We could see them flitting about in their
white jackets in front of this hotel, but could speak to none of
them.
Soon after the holidays were over, contrary to all our
expectations, Messrs. Hamilton and Freeland came up to Easton;
not to make a bargain with the "Georgia traders," nor to send us
up to Austin Woldfolk, as is usual in the case of run-away
salves, <232>but to release Charles, Henry Harris, Henry Baily
and John Harris, from prison, and this, too, without the
My Bondage and My Freedom |
