| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: He returned to her, and had the unspeakable joy of seeing her wag her
tail with an almost imperceptible movement at his approach. He sat
down then, without fear, by her side, and they began to play together;
he took her paws and muzzle, pulled her ears, rolled her over on her
back, stroked her warm, delicate flanks. She let him do what ever he
liked, and when he began to stroke the hair on her feet she drew her
claws in carefully.
The man, keeping the dagger in one hand, thought to plunge it into the
belly of the too confiding panther, but he was afraid that he would be
immediately strangled in her last convulsive struggle; besides, he
felt in his heart a sort of remorse which bid him respect a creature
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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 Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: Halliday's comments grew daily more and more sparklingly
disagreeable and disparaging. He went diligently about, laughing at
the town, individually and in mass. But his laugh was the only one
left in the village: it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and
emptiness. Not even a smile was findable anywhere. Halliday
carried a cigar-box around on a tripod, playing that it was a
camera, and halted all passers and aimed the thing and said "Ready!
--now look pleasant, please," but not even this capital joke could
surprise the dreary faces into any softening.
So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening
after supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
