Today's Stichomancy for Mohandas Gandhi

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell:

passing their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. At last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, the symposium of poets breaks up.

Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family, wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holiday are much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre of attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquette permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child.

This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa:

upward till it vanished in the blue ether.

"Is that Iktomi's spirit?" asked one fawn of another.

"No! I think he would jump out before he could burn into smoke and cinders," answered his comrade.

THE BADGER AND THE BEAR

ON the edge of a forest there lived a large family of badgers. In the ground their dwelling was made. Its walls and roof were covered with rocks and straw.

Old father badger was a great hunter. He knew well how to track the deer and buffalo. Every day he came home carrying on his

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac:

de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou) advanced so much that when the portraits were finished he presented them gratuitously to his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and his wife.

At the present day, Pierre Grassou, who never misses exhibiting at the Salon, passes in bourgeois regions for a fine portrait-painter. He earns some twenty thousand francs a year and spoils a thousand francs' worth of canvas. His wife has six thousand francs a year in dowry, and he lives with his father-in-law. The Vervelles and the Grassous, who agree delightfully, keep a carriage, and are the happiest people on earth. Pierre Grassou never emerges from the bourgeois circle, in

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 Camille by Alexandre Dumas:

which must come from daily excesses like this. At length, something which I had feared and foreseen happened. Toward the end of supper Marguerite was seized by a more violent fit of coughing than any she had had while I was there. It seemed as if her chest were being torn in two. The poor girl turned crimson, closed her eyes under the pain, and put her napkin to her lips. It was stained with a drop of blood. She rose and ran into her dressing-room.

"What is the matter with Marguerite?" asked Gaston.

"She has been laughing too much, and she is spitting blood. Oh, it is nothing; it happens to her every day. She will be back in a

Camille