| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: pointing to a seat on a sofa, while she finished a note she was then
writing. The conversation began in a commonplace manner: the weather,
the ministry, de Marsay's illness, the hopes of the legitimists.
D'Arthez was an absolutist; the princess could not be ignorant of the
opinions of a man who sat in the Chamber among the fifteen or twenty
persons who represented the legitimist party; she found means to tell
him how she had fooled de Marsay to the top of his bent, then, by an
easy transition to the royal family and to "Madame," and the devotion
of the Prince de Cadignan to their service, she drew d'Arthez's
attention to the prince:--
"There is this to be said for him: he loved his masters, and was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: for his gun. The loop of the riata fell wide over him,
immediately to be jerked tight, binding his arms tight to his
side.
The bronco-buster, swept from his feet by the pony's rapid turn,
nevertheless struggled desperately to wrench himself loose.
Button, intelligent at all rope work, walked steadily backward,
step by step, taking up the slack, keeping the rope tight as he
had done hundreds of times before when a steer had struggled as
this man was struggling now. His master leaped from the saddle
and ran forward. Button continued to walk slowly back. The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: merriment was echoed and prolonged by a mongrel legion of
retainers, Canadian voyageurs, half-breeds, Indian hunters, and
vagabond hangers-on who feasted sumptuously without on the crumbs
that fell from their table, and made the welkin ring with old
French ditties, mingled with Indian yelps and yellings.
Such was the Northwest Company in its powerful and prosperous
days, when it held a kind of feudal sway over a vast domain of
lake and forest. We are dwelling too long, perhaps, upon these
individual pictures, endeared to us by the associations of early
life, when, as yet a stripling youth, we have sat at the
hospitable boards of the "mighty Northwesters," the lords of the
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