| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum: under water yonder. Did Coo-ee-oh come here in the boat
to meet the Flatheads before the island was sunk, or
afterward?"
No one could answer that question, of course; but
while they pondered the matter three young men advanced
from the line of trees, and rather timidly bowed to the
strangers.
"Who are you, and where did you come from?" inquired
the Wizard.
"We are Skeezers," answered one of them, "and our
home is on the Magic Isle of the Lake. We ran away when
Glinda of Oz |
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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as
because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the
stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is
bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and
sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with
drift and decaying things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.
Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of
the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber,
above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort,
whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half
choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with
|
