| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: flow of the canon-bed first came into view.
"That's where we'll camp," said he.
"When?" we asked.
"When we get there," he answered.
For this canon lies in the heart of the mountains.
Those who would visit it have first to get into the
country--a matter of over a week. Then they have
their choice of three probabilities of destruction.
The first route comprehends two final days of
travel at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where
the snow lies in midsummer; where there is no feed,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms
(called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues
its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then
attached to the short-warp--the rope which is immediately connected
with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes
through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the
timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the
deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef,
and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it
is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so
many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he
said, 'when I had money of my own, I always gave it.' It was only on
Saturday morning, after three whole days of starvation, that he asked
a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her own accord a glass of
milk. He had now made up his mind to stow away, not from any desire
to see America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the
forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He lived by begging,
always from milkwomen, and always scones and milk, and was not once
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