Today's Stichomancy for Bill Gates

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain:

"Ay-ay, sir!"

In about a second I begun to see I'd woke up a pretty ugly customer, Peters. In less than ten seconds that comet was just a blazing cloud of red-hot canvas. It was piled up into the heavens clean out of sight - the old thing seemed to swell out and occupy all space; the sulphur smoke from the furnaces - oh, well, nobody can describe the way it rolled and tumbled up into the skies, and nobody can half describe the way it smelt. Neither can anybody begin to describe the way that monstrous craft begun to crash along. And such another powwow - thousands of bo's'n's whistles screaming at once, and a crew like the populations of a hundred

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

door she turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me. I looked at her again--I had been keeping my eyes away from her--but only to meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl's trouble that I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn't express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble than there actually might have been. I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected to give her. It rolled over me there for the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

and see that you turn not back until she be safe with- in the castle walls; then you may bring aid."

The old fellow had been wont to obey the imperious little Lady Joan from her earliest childhood, and the habit was so strong upon him that he wheeled his horse and galloped after the flying palfrey of the Lady Mary de Stutevill.

As Joan de Tany turned again to the encounter be- fore her, she saw fully twenty men surrounding Roger de Conde, and while he was taking heavy toll of those before him he could not cope with the men who at-

The Outlaw of Torn

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 Richard III by William Shakespeare:

To bear the golden yoke of sovereignty, Which fondly you would here impose on me; If to reprove you for this suit of yours, So season'd with your faithful love to me, Then, on the other side, I check'd my friends. Therefore-to speak, and to avoid the first, And then, in speaking, not to incur the last- Definitively thus I answer you: Your love deserves my thanks, but my desert Unmeritable shuns your high request. First, if all obstacles were cut away,

Richard III