| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: through one night, as told about by you in ROUGHING IT--my uncle
Simmons remembers it very well. He lived in the principal cabin,
half-way up the divide, along with Dixon and Parker and Smith.
It had two rooms, one for kitchen and the other for bunks,
and was the only one that had. You and your party were there on
the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie, Uncle Simmons
often speaks of it. It seems curious that dried-apple-pie should
have seemed such a great thing, but it was, and it shows how far
Humboldt was out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim
the regular bill of fare was. Sixteen years ago--it is a long time.
I was a little girl then, only fourteen. I never saw you, I lived
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house
and no housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the
first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us
that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter
under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they
make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did
not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's
blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's
crop was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very
thin for a long season." The secretary of the Province of New
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: Under an osier growing by a brook,
A brook where Adon used to cool his spleen:
Hot was the day; she hotter that did look
For his approach, that often there had been.
Anon he comes, and throws his mantle by,
And stood stark naked on the brook's green brim:
The sun look'd on the world with glorious eye,
Yet not so wistly as this queen on him.
He, spying her, bounced in, whereas he stood:
'O Jove,' quoth she, 'why was not I a flood!'
VII.
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