| 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: to blame. Would that I were not witty; oh, that I had never had
that radiant thought!
NEXT YEAR.--We have named it Cain. She caught it while I was up country
trapping on the North Shore of the Erie; caught it in the timber a
couple of miles from our dug-out--or it might have been four, she isn't
certain which. It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation.
That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment.
The difference in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different
and new kind of animal--a fish, perhaps, though when I put it in the
water to see, it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before
there was opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: laying yonder in the sycamores, and it seemed like being
that close to a ghost, and it give me the cold shudders.
The moon come a-swelling up out of the ground, now,
powerful big and round and bright, behind a comb of trees,
like a face looking through prison bars, and the black
shadders and white places begun to creep around,
and it was miserable quiet and still and night-breezy
and graveyardy and scary. All of a sudden Tom whispers:
"Look!--what's that?"
"Don't!" I says. "Don't take a person by surprise that way.
I'm 'most ready to die, anyway, without you doing that."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: dormitories; and on their porches enlisted men in shirt sleeves
and overalls were cleaning saddles, and polishing the brass of
head-stalls and bridles, whistling the while or smoking corn-cob
pipes. Here on the parade-ground a soldier, his coat and vest
removed, was batting grounders and flies to a half-dozen of his
fellows. Over by the stables, strings of horses, all of the same
color, were being curried and cleaned. A young lieutenant upon a
bicycle spun silently past. An officer came from his front gate,
his coat unbuttoned and a briar in his teeth. The walks and roads
were flanked with lines of black-painted cannon-balls; inverted
pieces of abandoned ordnance stood at corners. From a distance
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