| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: with a hasty motion.
"At such times," continued Coyctier, "persons attend to their business
while asleep. As this man is fond of hoarding, he has simply pursued
his dearest habit. No doubt each of these attacks have come on after a
day in which he has felt some fears about the safety of his treasure."
"Pasques-Dieu! and such treasure!" cried the king.
"Where is it?" asked Cornelius, who, by a singular provision of
nature, heard the remarks of the king and his physician, while
continuing himself almost torpid with thought and the shock of this
singular misfortune.
"Ha!" cried Coyctier, bursting into a diabolical, coarse laugh,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: stones. Three men knew what was under it; and no one else ever will.
Lily Kloof,
South Africa.
II. THE WOMAN'S ROSE.
I have an old, brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied with a string.
In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a little
picture which hung over my brother's bed when we were children, and other
things as small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have such boxes
where they keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.
When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman
flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair, the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: sparse population,[3] and at the same time the extraordinary power and
prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It
was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the
Spartans that my wonderment ceased. Or rather, it is transferred to
the legislator who gave them those laws, obedience to which has been
the secret of their prosperity. This legislator, Lycurgus, I must
needs admire, and hold him to have been one of the wisest of mankind.
Certainly he was no servile imitator of other states. It was by a
stroke of invention rather, and on a pattern much in opposition to the
commonly-accepted one, that he brought his fatherland to this pinnacle
of prosperity.
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