| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: the nursing you can, for there's none to match you in that divine
office in this town; but you can't do all of it, and it would
be a crime to let you." It was grand praise, golden praise,
coming from such a source, and it took nearly all the resentment
out of the aged twin's hearts. "Your Tilly and my old Nancy shall
do the rest--good nurses both, white souls with black skins,
watchful, loving, tender--just perfect nurses!--and competent liars
from the cradle. . . . Look you! keep a little watch on Helen;
she is sick, and is going to be sicker."
The ladies looked a little surprised, and not credulous; and Hester said:
"How is that? It isn't an hour since you said she was as sound
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen
or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial
instinct what profit we could extract from them.
But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals;
they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
friendship,[1] and accorded them a kind of divinity. This
was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of
solidarity with Nature. And the point of it all is (with regard
to the subject we have in hand) that this was also
the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of
 Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: did not seem very promising. At the time, however,
I did not know what an untrustworthy humbug
Schomberg was. The "boy" might have been forty
or a hundred and forty for all you could tell--
one of those Chinamen of the death's-head type of
face and completely inscrutable. Before the end of
the third day he had revealed himself as a confirmed
opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief,
and a first-class sprinter. When he departed at the
top of his speed with thirty-two golden sovereigns
of my own hard-earned savings it was the last straw.
 Falk |