| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: would come. But now Yellowhammer was but a mountain camp, and nowhere
in it were the roguish, expectant eyes, opening wide at dawn of the
enchanting day; the eager, small hands to reach for Santa's
bewildering hoard; the elated, childish voicings of the season's joy,
such as the coming good things of the warm-hearted Cherokee deserved.
Of women there were five in Yellowhammer. The assayer's wife, the
proprietress of the Lucky Strike Hotel, and a laundress whose washtub
panned out an ounce of dust a day. These were the permanent feminines;
the remaining two were the Spangler Sisters, Misses Fanchon and Erma,
of the Transcontinental Comedy Company, then playing in repertoire at
the (improvised) Empire Theatre. But of children there were none.
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: share in my labors, and it was my happy fortune to meet with one of
those rare natures that seemed to have dropped down from heaven. Then
I went on with my enterprise. After preparing people's minds, I made
another transportation by night, and six more cretins were taken away.
In this second attempt I had the support of several people to whom I
had rendered some service, and I was backed by the members of the
Communal Council, for I had appealed to their parsimonious instincts,
showing them how much it cost to support the poor wretches, and
pointing out how largely they might gain by converting their plots of
ground (to which the idiots had no proper title) into allotments which
were needed in the township.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: but, confident in her own presentiments, her own unfailing hope, she
had the happiness of seeing him come safely through the perils of
childhood, with a constitution that was ever improving, in spite of
the warnings of the Faculty.
Thanks to her constant care, this son had grown and developed so much,
and so gracefully, that at twenty years of age, he was thought a most
elegant cavalier at Versailles. Madame de Dey possessed a happiness
which does not always crown the efforts and struggles of a mother. Her
son adored her; their souls understood each other with fraternal
sympathy. If they had not been bound by nature's ties, they would
instinctively have felt for each other that friendship of man to man,
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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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds, of
Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil
remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are
only found in the older underlying deposits, would be correctly ranked as
simultaneous in a geological sense.
The fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously, in the above large
sense, at distant parts of the world, has greatly struck those admirable
observers, MM. de Verneuil and d'Archiac. After referring to the
parallelism of the palaeozoic forms of life in various parts of Europe,
they add, 'If struck by this strange sequence, we turn our attention to
North America, and there discover a series of analogous phenomena, it will
On the Origin of Species |
