| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters,
for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had `advantages,' never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated.
The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much
from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new.
I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service
in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can
remember something unusual and engaging about each of them.
Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: "We might or we might not."
Bathsheba turned and looked into the fire, that
Liddy might not see her face. Finding that her mistress
was going to say no more, Liddy glided out, closed the
door softly, and went to bed.
Bathsheba's face, as she continued looking into the
fire that evening, might have excited solicitousness on
her account even among those who loved her least.
The sadness of Fanny Robin's fate did not make Bath-
sheba's glorious, although she was the Esther to this
poor Vashti, and their fates might be supposed to stand
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: how the child is at once at home, and all her terrors ended.
27TH. MAIL DAY.
And I don't know that I have much to report. I may have to
leave for Malie as soon as these mail packets are made up.
'Tis a necessity (if it be one) I rather deplore. I think I
should have liked to lazy; but I daresay all it means is the
delay of a day or so in harking back to David Balfour; that
respectable youth chides at being left (where he is now) in
Glasgow with the Lord Advocate, and after five years in the
British Linen, who shall blame him? I was all forenoon
yesterday down in Apia,' dictating, and Lloyd type-writing,
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