| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: we stop there? No. We stop looking backward; we
face around and apply the law to the future. My
friends, I can tell you what people's wages are going
to be at any date in the future you want to know, for
hundreds and hundreds of years."
"What, goodman, what!"
"Yes. In seven hundred years wages will have
risen to six times what they are now, here in your
region, and farm hands will be allowed 3 cents a day,
and mechanics 6."
"I would't I might die now and live then!" inter-
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: and saw its hardness I found that it was much less soft, and
consequently more effective, than copper would have been. That
those underground savages had succeeded in combining metals was
incredible, but there was the evidence; and, besides, it may have
been a trick of nature herself.
The point was some six inches long and very sharp. It was set
on the shaft in a wedge, and bound with thin, tough strips of hide.
Altogether, a weapon not to be laughed at.
We carried the spears, the raft, and the oars behind a large
boulder to the left of the ledge with considerable difficulty. The
two latter not because we expected them to be of any service, but
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless,
for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections,
adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their
protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not
only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form,
the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and
the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the
various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the
potential forms. As one change is superposed on another, the
adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length.
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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 Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: outlined against the sky,--a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon.
About noon the road passed beyond the region of habitation into a
barren land, where blueberries were the only crop, and partridges
took the place of chickens. Through this rolling gravelly plain,
sparsely wooded and glowing with the tall magenta bloom of the
fireweed, we drove toward the mountains, until the road went to
seed and we could follow it no longer. Then we took to the water
and began to pole our canoes up the River of the Bear. It was a
clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than ten or fifteen yards
wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand and rounded
pebbles. The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the narrow
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