| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: other could stand a chance against me? and she was very severe with
him, and said, 'You ought to be ashamed - you are proposing to me
conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.' So he just tossed
her up in the air about thirty feet and caught her as she came
down, and said he was ashamed; and put up his handkerchief and
pretended to cry, which nearly broke her heart, and she petted him,
and begged him to forgive her, and said she would do anything in
the world he could ask but that; but he said he ought to go hang
himself, and he MUST, if he could get a rope; it was nothing but
right he should, for he never, never could forgive himself; and
then SHE began to cry, and they both sobbed, the way you could hear
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: the stuff of a Sophie Arnold, and handsome withal, as the handsomest
courtesan invited by Titian to pose on black velvet for a model of
Venus; although her face, fine about the eyes and forehead,
degenerated, lower down, into commonness of outline. Hers was a Norman
beauty, fresh, high-colored, redundant, the flesh of Rubens covering
the muscles of the Farnese Hercules, and not the slender articulations
of the Venus de' Medici, Apollo's graceful consort.
"Well, my child, tell me your great or your little adventure, whatever
it is."
The particular point about the chevalier which would have made him
noticeable from Paris to Pekin, was the gentle paternity of his manner
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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 Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and report this last of a long series of outrages upon our
commerce. God alone knows how many hundreds of our ancient
ships fell prey to the roving steel sharks of blood-frenzied
Europe. Countless were the vessels and men that passed over
our eastern and western horizons never to return; but
whether they met their fates before the belching tubes of
submarines or among the aimlessly drifting mine fields, no
man lived to tell.
And then came the great Pan-American Federation which linked
the Western Hemisphere from pole to pole under a single
flag, which joined the navies of the New World into the
Lost Continent |
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 Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: III
At Carnival time, in the sixth year of Sergius's life at the
hermitage, a merry company of rich people, men and women from a
neighbouring town, made up a troyka-party, after a meal of
carnival-pancakes and wine. The company consisted of two
lawyers, a wealthy landowner, an officer, and four ladies. One
lady was the officer's wife, another the wife of the landowner,
the third his sister--a young girl--and the fourth a divorcee,
beautiful, rich, and eccentric, who amazed and shocked the town
by her escapades.
The weather was excellent and the snow-covered road smooth as a
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