| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: out of the Chairman's hands. He was not unthankful for that.
Thenceforward he held up each note in its turn and waited. The
house droned out the eight words in a massed and measured and
musical deep volume of sound (with a daringly close resemblance to a
well-known church chant)--"You are f-a-r from being a b-a-a-a-d
man." Then the Chair said, "Signature, 'Archibald Wilcox.'" And so
on, and so on, name after name, and everybody had an increasingly
and gloriously good time except the wretched Nineteen. Now and
then, when a particularly shining name was called, the house made
the Chair wait while it chanted the whole of the test-remark from
the beginning to the closing words, "And go to hell or Hadleyburg--
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: really dead I shouldn't be able to move." It appears that the
first sense to leave a drowning man, and the last to return, is the
sense of humor.
In another ten minutes, having rid my lungs of the water that
had filled them, I felt no pain and but little fatigue. My head
was dizzy, and there was still a feeling of oppression on my chest;
but otherwise I was little the worse for wear. I twisted carefully
over on my side and took note of my surroundings.
I lay on a narrow ledge of rock at the entrance to a huge
cavern. Not two feet below rushed the stream which had carried me;
it came down through an opening in the wall at a sharp angle with
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