Today's Stichomancy for Madonna

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:

required; a scout horse has to have steel in his muscle and lightning in his blood.

My father was a bronco. Nothing as to lineage - that is, nothing as to recent lineage - but plenty good enough when you go a good way back. When Professor Marsh was out here hunting bones for the chapel of Yale University he found skeletons of horses no bigger than a fox, bedded in the rocks, and he said they were ancestors of my father. My mother heard him say it; and he said those skeletons were two million years old, which astonished her and made her Kentucky pretensions look small and pretty antiphonal, not to say oblique. Let me see. . . . I used to know the meaning of those

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister:

much courage as he had caught him in the water and just as few clothes, only it was so different. Richard makes it quite thrilling. And I mentioned another to him. But he just went on shaving. And now he has gone out walking, and I believe it's going to be something I would rather not hear. But I mean to hear it."

At lunch Mrs. Field made a better meal, although it was clear to Mrs. Davenport that Richard on returning from his walk had still kept his intentions from Ethel. "She does not manage him in the least," Mrs. Davenport declared to the other ladies, as Ethel and Richard started for an afternoon drive together. "She will not know anything more when she brings him back."

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain:

that I shall not catch all the men to whom I mailed the pretended test-secret, but I shall catch the most of them, if I know Hadleyburg nature. [Voices. "Right--he got every last one of them."] I believe they will even steal ostensible GAMBLE-money, rather than miss, poor, tempted, and mistrained fellows. I am hoping to eternally and everlastingly squelch your vanity and give Hadleyburg a new renown--one that will STICK--and spread far. If I have succeeded, open the sack and summon the Committee on Propagation and Preservation of the Hadleyburg Reputation.'"

A Cyclone of Voices. "Open it! Open it! The Eighteen to the front! Committee on Propagation of the Tradition! Forward--the

The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg

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 Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare:

How Tarquin must be used, read it in me: Myself, thy friend, will kill myself, thy foe, And, for my sake, serve thou false Tarquin so.

'This brief abridgement of my will I make: My soul and body to the skies and ground; My resolution, husband, do thou take; Mine honour be the knife's that makes my wound; My shame be his that did my fame confound; And all my fame that lives disburs'd be To those that live, and think no shame of me.

'Thou, Collatine, shalt oversee this will;