Pulling the outer text from an element when using XSLT

[achava]

Suppose you have an xml file that has a portion that looks like:

The cat is in the house
The horse is also in the house

Another pigeon?

Since the top div here is buried somewhere within the file, I am trying to isolate it with

...

but I want the only thing to get transferred to the output file to be "The cat is in the house" I realize that in the node tree that forms the input, this is the text child of the

[Erwan Amoureux]

It's the first text() node so :

<xsl:value-of select="text()[1]">

[achava]

It is indeed the first text node, so cool, now you know why I am a newbie. I wll try this momentarily.