| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: standing about. Let's go into the dining-room a minute.
Just one glass to warm me, Alan.'
On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a
whisky label on a tray. It was plain the bottle had been
just opened, for the cork and corkscrew lay beside it.
'Take that,' said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then
with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom,
and closed the door behind him.
John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his
further wonder, found it partly empty. Three or four glasses
were gone. Alan must have uncorked a bottle of whisky and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: incredible force to any explosion of feeling, and to meet an
impassioned lover is one of the greatest dangers they can encounter.
Never had Emilie and Maximilien allowed their eyes to say so much that
they dared never speak. Carried a way by this intoxication, they
easily forgot the petty stipulations of pride, and the cold
hesitancies of suspicion. At first, indeed, they could only express
themselves by a pressure of hands which interpreted their happy
thoughts.
After slowing pacing a few steps in long silence, Mademoiselle de
Fontaine spoke. "Monsieur, I have a question to ask you," she said
trembling, and in an agitated voice. "But, remember, I beg, that it is
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: interest, which cannot here be entered on.) Woman naturally took the heavy
agricultural and domestic labours, which were yet more consistent with the
continual dependence of infant life on her own, than those of man in war
and the chase. There was nothing artificial in such a division; it threw
the heaviest burden of the most wearying and unexciting forms of social
labour on woman, but under it both sexes laboured in a manner essential to
the existence of society, and each transmitted to the other, through
inheritance, the fruit of its slowly expanding and always exerted powers;
and the race progressed.
Individual women might sometimes, and even often, become the warrior chief
of a tribe; the King of Ashantee might train his terrible regiment of
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: had hitherto preceded her in a pretty orderly manner, when they
came to this wide common, interspersed with marshes and pools of
water, scattered in every direction, to plunge into the element
in which they delighted. Incensed at the obstinacy with which
they defied all her efforts to collect them, and not remembering
the precise terms of the contract by which the fiend was bound to
obey her commands for a certain space, the sorceress exclaimed,
"Deevil, that neither I nor they ever stir from this spot more!"
The words were hardly uttered, when, by a metamorphosis as sudden
as any in Ovid, the hag and her refractory flock were converted
into stone, the angel whom she served, being a strict formalist,
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