| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: "My friends," I answered, making a sign for them to enter,
"you are not in Canada, but on board the Nautilus, fifty yards
below the level of the sea."
"But, M. Aronnax," said Ned Land, "can you tell me how many men
there are on board? Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred?"
"I cannot answer you, Mr. Land; it is better to abandon for a
time all idea of seizing the Nautilus or escaping from it.
This ship is a masterpiece of modern industry, and I should be
sorry not to have seen it. Many people would accept the situation
forced upon us, if only to move amongst such wonders.
So be quiet and let us try and see what passes around us."
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be
satisfactory--to the electors. The outcome of this ballot, like
that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable
mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil
one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes of
impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their
conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is
well known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form
devoid of substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony,
the civil contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between
the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: circle to the other side of the stream. There we quickly picked
up the trail of the two uninjured beasts. They had headed
directly over the hill, where we speedily lost all trace of them
on the flint-like surface of the ground. We saw a big pack of
baboons in the only likely direction for a lion to go. Being thus
thrown back on a choice of a hundred other unlikely directions,
we gave up that slim chance and returned to the thicket.
This proved to be a very dense piece of cover. Above the height
of the waist the interlocking branches would absolutely prevent
any progress, but by stooping low we could see dimly among the
simpler main stems to a distance of perhaps fifteen or twenty
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