Today's Stichomancy for Denise Richards

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London:

remain to be accounted for; but I outrun my story, and such accounting will be made before I am done.

CHAPTER XII

I have no idea how long Lop-Ear and I wandered in the land north of the river. We were like mariners wrecked on a desert isle, so far as concerned the likelihood of our getting home again. We turned our backs upon the river, and for weeks and months adventured in that wilderness where there were no Folk. It is very difficult for me to reconstruct our journeying, and impossible to do it from day to day. Most of it is

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson:

ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Bab:A Sub-Deb, Mary Roberts Rinehart by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

nails, which usually comforts me, and put my hair up like Leila's.

But nothing could calm me. I had made my own Fate, and must lie in it. And just then Hannah slipped in with a box in her hands and her eyes frightened.

"Oh, Miss Barbara!" she said. "If your mother sees this!"

I dropped my manacure scizzors, I was so alarmed. But I opened the box, and clutched the envelope inside. It said "from H----." Then Carter was right. There was an H after all!

Hannah was rolling her hands in her apron and her eyes were poping out of her head.

"I just happened to see the boy at the door," she said, with her

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 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

been a wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's -- have I her name rightly? -- of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?" "Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched

The Scarlet Letter