| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: observe his habits and development. Seeing Dr. Bandinel near,
I asked him to look at my curiosity. Hardly, however, had I turned
the wriggling little victim out upon the leather-covered table,
when down came the doctor's great thumb-nail upon him,
and an inch-long smear proved the tomb of all my hopes,
while the great bibliographer, wiping his thumb on his coat sleeve,
passed on with the remark, "Oh, yes! they have black heads sometimes."
That was something to know--another fact for the entomologist;
for my little gentleman had a hard, shiny, white head,
and I never heard of a black-headed bookworm before or since.
Perhaps the great abundance of black-letter books in the Bodleian
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: keeping it whirling all the time.
[1] Small feet of the Chinese woman.
My surprise was so great that I gave the old woman ten
cents for performing this single trick.
The tricks of sleight-of-hand performers are well-nigh
without number. Some of them are easily understood,--surprising,
however, to children--and often interesting to grown people,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap-
sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not
even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She
was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard-
men surmised that she had either dragged her an-
chor or parted her cable some time during the
night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after
the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little
and released some of the bodies, because a child
--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--
came ashore abreast of the Martello tower. By
Amy Foster |
