| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: Shoreditch parishes; but there was not ten people a week that died of
it in all that part of Stepney parish which takes in Limehouse, Ratdiff
Highway, and which are now the parishes of Shadwell and Wapping,
even to St Katherine's by the Tower, till after the whole month of
August was expired. But they paid for it afterwards, as I shall observe
by-and-by.
This, I say, made the people of Redriff and Wapping, Ratcliff and
Limehouse, so secure, and flatter themselves so much with the
plague's going off without reaching them, that they took no care either
to fly into the country or shut themselves up. Nay, so far were they
from stirring that they rather received their friends and relations from
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: running horizontally around the middle, a fold which a needle is
able to raise without breaking it. This hem, generally
undistinguishable from the rest of the surface, is none other than
the edge of the circular mat, drawn over the lower hemisphere. The
other hemisphere, through which the youngsters will go out, is less
well fortified: its only wrapper is the texture spun over the eggs
immediately after they were laid.
Inside, there is nothing but the eggs: no mattress, no soft
eiderdown, like that of the Epeirae. The Lycosa, indeed, has no
need to guard her eggs against the inclemencies of the winter, for
the hatching will take place long before the cold weather comes.
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he
did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the day
before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am
proud to remember) as a friend.
Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint.
Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; scarce flying higher
than the story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly
seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts,
whether of poetry or music, adequately embodied in that somewhat
obvious ditty,
"Will ye gang, lassie, gang
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