| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: a cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you
enjoy fine clothes? It is not possible to answer these
questions without a trial; and there is nothing more obvious
to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups
and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his
father's house, has still his education to begin. Let the
experiment be made, and he will find to his surprise that he
has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour; that the
cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes,
the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits,
but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: Now thrice that morning Guinevere had climbed
The giant tower, from whose high crest, they say,
Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset,
And white sails flying on the yellow sea;
But not to goodly hill or yellow sea
Looked the fair Queen, but up the vale of Usk,
By the flat meadow, till she saw them come;
And then descending met them at the gates,
Embraced her with all welcome as a friend,
And did her honour as the Prince's bride,
And clothed her for her bridals like the sun;
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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 Mother by Owen Wister: 'it might be worth while to capitalise her premium.'"
"I liked the idea of capitalising one's premium. If you had fifty bonds
that cost you par, and sold them at 110, you would then buy at par
fifty-five bonds of some other rising kind, and go on doing this until--I
named no limit for this process; but my delighted mind saw visions of
eighty and a hundred thousand a year--comfort at least, if not affluence
in New York--and I explained to Ethel what the phrase capitalising one's
premium meant. I showed her the Petunias, too, and we read what it said
on the coupons aloud together. Ethel was at first not quite satisfied
with the arrangement of the coupons. 'Thirty dollars on January first,
and thirty on July first,' she said. That seems a long while to wait for
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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 Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: one of the many inky passages which the superstitious
descendants of the ancient Sun Worshipers had either
dared not or cared not to explore.
Tiring at last of this diversion, Tarzan took up his way
along the corridor which led upward from the jewel-room
by a steep incline. Winding and twisting, but always
tending upward, the tunnel led him nearer and
nearer to the surface, ending finally in a low-ceiled
room, lighter than any that he had as yet discovered.
Above him an opening in the ceiling at the upper end of
a flight of concrete steps revealed a brilliant sunlit
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
