Today's Stichomancy for Avril Lavigne

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

But while unmoved their sleep they take, We mourn for their dear Captain's sake, For their dear Captain, who shall smart Both in his pocket and his heart, Who saw his heroes shed their gore, And lacked a shilling to buy more!

THE GRAVER THE PEN: OR, SCENES FROM NATURE, WITH APPROPRIATE VERSES

Poem: I - PROEM

Unlike the common run of men, I wield a double power to please, And use the GRAVER and the PEN

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry:

high. The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and it's hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago.

At an East Side hotel we gets acquainted with Romulus G. Atterbury, a man with the finest head for financial operations I ever saw. It was all bald and glossy except for gray side whiskers. Seeing that head behind an office railing, and you'd deposit a million with it without a receipt. This Atterbury was well dressed, though he ate seldom; and

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson:

returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts - eager to labour - eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion - and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

We thank Thee and praise Thee; and in the words of him to whom this day is sacred, close our oblation.

FOR SELF-BLAME

LORD, enlighten us to see the beam that is in our own eye, and blind us to the mote that is in our brother's. Let us feel our offences with our hands, make them great and bright before us like the sun, make us eat them and drink them for our diet. Blind us to

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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

trellised garden worked in gold and silk. A carpet representing cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cherries in a basin." These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large a space in the attention of mediaeval men might be occupied by such figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered