| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: corroborate Grey and Legard, and to give full details of that last
interview, but also to swear to the peculiar value which Jack
attached to the talisman ring which he had given Delia; to the
language she had held when I saw her after my return from Oxford;
to her subsequent letter, and Jack's fatal silence on the occasion.
The story by which Jack and I strove to account for the facts was
laughed at as a clumsy invention, and my undisguised reluctance in
giving evidence added greatly to its weight against my brother's
character.
"The jury returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, the
result of desertion by her lover. You may imagine how that verdict
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars
that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less
forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common
provocations. A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and
the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression
of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first
excursion into England. The change from a hilly to a level country
strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon there
arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He sees at the
end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He may go
where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and
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