| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop: of its own plumes. "Alas!" it cried, as it died,
"We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction."
The Milkmaid and Her Pail
Patty the Milkmaid was going to market carrying her milk in a
Pail on her head. As she went along she began calculating what
she would do with the money she would get for the milk. "I'll buy
some fowls from Farmer Brown," said she, "and they will lay eggs
each morning, which I will sell to the parson's wife. With the
money that I get from the sale of these eggs I'll buy myself a new
dimity frock and a chip hat; and when I go to market, won't all
the young men come up and speak to me! Polly Shaw will be that
Aesop's Fables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: the Rue Chabannais--five rooms at a rent of seven hundred francs at
most. Each partner slept in a little closet, so carefully closed from
prudence, that my head-clerk could never get inside. The furniture of
the other three rooms--an ante-chamber, a waiting-room, and a private
office--would not have fetched three hundred francs altogether at a
distress-warrant sale. You know enough of Paris to know the look of
it; the stuffed horsehair-covered chairs, a table covered with a green
cloth, a trumpery clock between a couple of candle sconces, growing
tarnished under glass shades, the small gilt-framed mirror over the
chimney-piece, and in the grate a charred stick or two of firewood
which had lasted them for two winters, as my head-clerk put it. As for
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