Today's Stichomancy for Jim Jones

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare:

Your treatise makes me like you worse and worse.

'If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues, And every tongue more moving than your own, 776 Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs, Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown; For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear, And will not let a false sound enter there; 780

'Lest the deceiving harmony should run Into the quiet closure of my breast; And then my little heart were quite undone, In his bedchamber to be barr'd of rest. 784

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bucky O'Connor by William MacLeod Raine:

tell lies ain't square. If I ask you anything you don't want to answer tell me to go to hell, but don't lie to me. If you do I'll punish you the same as if you were my brother, so long as you trail with me. If you don't like it, cut loose and hit the pike for yourself."

"I've a good mind to go."

Bucky waved a hand easily into space. "That's all right, too, son. There's a heap of directions you can hit from here. Take any one you like. But if I was as beat as you are, I think I'd keep on the Epitaph road." He laughed his warm, friendly laugh, before the geniality of which discord seemed to melt, and again his arm

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

croaked; but your maw an' your paw ain't an' they want you back, Eddie. I don't care ef you believe me, son, or not; but your maw was mighty good to me, an' you promise me you'll write her an' then go back home as fast as you can. It ain't everybody's got a swell maw like that, an' them as has ought to be good to 'em."

Beyond the closed door Eddie's jaw was commencing to tremble. Memory was flooding his heart and his eyes with sweet recollections of an ample breast where he used to pillow his head, of a big capable hand that was wont to smooth his brow and stroke back his red hair. Eddie gulped.

The Mucker

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 Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London:

failed to make the down-Yukon trip to file upon his property. Men cast hungry eyes upon the ownerless claim, where they knew a thousand-thousand dollars waited but shovel and sluice-box. Yet they dared not touch it; for there was a law which permitted sixty days to lapse between the staking and the filing, during which time a claim was immune. The whole country knew of Olaf Nelson's disappearance, and scores of men made preparation for the jumping and for the consequent race to Fort Cudahy.

But competition at Forty Mile was limited. With the camp devoting its energies to the equipping either of Jack Harrington or Louis Savoy, no man was unwise enough to enter the contest single-