| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: before I could pull it away, and then, in a moment, I found myself
attached to a creature with the strength of a whale and the agility
of a flying-fish. He led me rushing up and down the bank like a
madman. He played on the surface like a whirlwind, and sulked at
the bottom like a stone. He meditated, with ominous delay, in the
middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting across the river,
flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on the green
turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake in
the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled
quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A
few minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: slavery question--the simple, easy plan which, while a member of
Congress, he had proposed for the District of Columbia--that on
condition of the slave-owners voluntarily giving up their slaves,
they should be paid a fair price for them by the Federal
government. Delaware was a slave State, and seemed an excellent
place in which to try this experiment of "compensated
emancipation," as it was called; for there were, all told, only
1798 slaves left in the State. Without any public announcement of
his purpose he offered to the citizens of Delaware, through their
representative in Congress, four hundred dollars for each of
these slaves, the payment to be made, not all at once, but
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: prayers, had armed her with this last weapon--this dirty bribe.
I flung it down on the table among the plates.
'Madame!' I cried ruthlessly, all my pity changed to anger, 'you
mistake me altogether! I have heard hard words enough in the
last twenty-four hours, and I know what you think of me! But you
have yet to learn that I have never done one thing. I have never
turned traitor to the hand that employed me, nor sold my own
side! When I do so for a treasure ten times the worth of that,
may my hand rot off!'
She sank on a seat with a moan of despair; and precisely at that
moment M. de Cocheforet opened the door and came in. Over his
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