Today's Stichomancy for Benjamin Franklin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

domain of the chief against whom he had risen in revolt; but Du-seen must have known Jor the chief and known that Jor would not be waiting for him at the pass. Nevertheless he took unwarranted chances. With one squad of a home-guard company I could have conquered Caspak.

Nobs and I followed to the summit of the pass, and there we saw the party defiling into the Galu country, the level of which was not, on an average, over fifty feet below the summit of the cliffs and about a hundred and fifty feet above the adjacent Kro-lu domain. Immediately the landscape changed. The trees, the flowers and the shrubs were of a hardier type, and I

The People That Time Forgot

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare:

Away, I say, and bring them hither straight.

[Exit KATHERINA.]

LUCENTIO. Here is a wonder, if you talk of a wonder.

HORTENSIO. And so it is. I wonder what it bodes.

PETRUCHIO. Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life, An awful rule, and right supremacy; And, to be short, what not that's sweet and happy.

BAPTISTA.

The Taming of the Shrew

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft:

we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear. Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily - a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around

At the Mountains of Madness

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 Baby Mine by Margaret Mayo:

gravely-- then into the future.

"There are other things more important than what YOU call 'love,' " he said, very solemnly.

"There is such a thing as a soul, if you only knew it. And you have hurt mine through and through."

"But how, Alfred, how?" asked the small person, and there was a frown of genuine perplexity on her tiny puckered brow. "What have I REALLY DONE," She stroked his hand fondly; her baby eyes searched his face.

"It isn't so much what people DO to us that counts," answered Alfred in a proud hurt voice. "It's how much they DISAPPOINT us