| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: attacks, which I am bound to moderate lest I should injure her.
She is no sooner attracted outside than she stubbornly returns to
her post. She declines to leave her treasure.
Even so does the Narbonne Lycosa struggle when we try to take away
her pill. Each displays the same pluck and the same devotion; and
also the same denseness in distinguishing her property from that of
others. The Lycosa accepts without hesitation any strange pill
which she is, given in exchange for her own; she confuses alien
produce with the produce of her ovaries and her silk-factory.
Those hallowed words, maternal love, were out of place here: it is
an impetuous, an almost mechanical impulse, wherein real affection
 The Life of the Spider |
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 Mansion by Henry van Dyke: even when you give it away?"
"It's not for me to say why not--and yet I can think of cases--"
The young man hesitated for a moment. His half-finished cigar
had
gone out. He rose and tossed it into the fire, in front of which
he remained standing--a slender, eager, restless young figure,
with a touch of hunger in the fine face, strangely like and
unlike
the father, at whom he looked with half-wistful curiosity.
"The fact is, sir," he continued, "there is such a case in my
mind now,
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